The broad circular stairs of the central keep wound upward through four levels of massive, lime-washed stonework, lighted at every half-turn by narrow arrow-slits that framed the jagged peaks of the Spine.
With every twenty steps, the air grew noticeably warmer, exchanging the stone damp of the lower cellars for the dry, pine-scented heat of pine logs burning in open fire bowls. Behind Kezra came Yseld Arken, her boots silent on the stone treads. Paxa Sel, carrying her satchel of medical registers. And Chief Cartographer Ulvan Dret, who leaned heavily on the iron wall-handrail, his breath wheezing through his tight chest.
As Kezra climbed, her right hand rested on the lacquered cap of the map-tube slung beneath her left arm. She kept her stride even. She measured her breath to keep her pulse below seventy beats a minute. In five minutes, she would step across the threshold of the room where the fate of Alderfast, Kilnstep, and four hundred royal soldiers would be decided. Not with steel or siege engines, but with a piece of parchment and a single, double-edged destination name.
Marshal Solvan Krail was not a monster from a nurse’s fireside tale. He didn’t burn villages for sport, torture prisoners for amusement, or dream of demonic thrones. Across forty years of border warfare, Krail had operated with the cold, exact discipline of a royal merchant-banker who dealt in battalions and mountain passes instead of wool bales and copper bars.
