Chapter 4: The Siege at Vellhaven Pass

The pass announced itself the night before with cold.

Not the ordinary cold of elevation — Elwin had mapped enough highland terrain to know the difference — but something specific and presaging, a drop that arrived between one hour and the next as though the air had made a decision. He noted it on his working sheet without understanding why, the way he sometimes documented weather events in the margins of survey maps, a habit his old mentor Aldath had called superstition dressed as methodology. *Superstition is what you call information you haven't explained yet,* Elwin had always wanted to say, but had never managed to say it in time.

By morning the temperature had stabilized and the sky above the treeline was the particular pale grey that promised neither rain nor sun, only a flat, directionless light that flattened shadows and made distances unreliable. Sorra, riding up alongside him as the column entered the final approach to Vellhaven, looked at it briefly and then looked away, which told him more than anything she might have said.