Down at the southern neck of the rubble ramp. There, the cart track from the lower hamlet emerged into the throat of the pass, a sudden, ragged roar of human voices rose into the thin mountain air. It wasn’t a battle cry, and it wasn’t a warning horn. It was the raw, uncontainable sound of eighty people realizing at the same instant that the black stone fist that had closed their valley for eighteen months had simply ceased to exist.
A dozen younger growers and orchard workers, their tools abandoned by the irrigation ditches, came sprinting up the slope with their wool smocks flapping in the wind. Behind them rattled two light two-wheeled handcarts, pushed by four teenage boys who were laughing and shouting to the lookouts on the terraced slopes above. To them, the disappearance of Stonewake Citadel was a fairy-tale miracle. The wall was gone, the sun was shining, and the great road out to the lowland cities lay wide open before their boots.
They surged past the lower boundary cairn, their iron-shod clogs clattering across the loose shale, heading straight for the newly arrived plateau.
Crack.
The sound of Adra Pike’s watch horn was short, dry, and sharp as a breaking pine branch. Adra stood on the high rock shoulder fifty paces above the ramp. She lowered the brass horn from her lips, unslung her heavy iron-billed pruning hook, and stepped squarely into the center of the wheel track. She planted her boots six inches behind the…
