Chapter 4: Morvaine's Evening Prayers and the Smudged Letter

The waystation had been abandoned long enough that the roof had opinions about it.

Three of the four walls still stood to their original height, which was more than could be said for the ceiling — half of it had collapsed inward at some point in the last decade, pulling the eastern corner down with it and leaving a gap in the stonework wide enough to see stars through, or would have been, if there had been stars. The clouds had closed in over the marshes while we were still making camp, and the sky above the gap was the particular shade of nothing that means rain before morning.

Cassian had assessed the structure in under two minutes, decided it was defensible in the ways that mattered and dilapidated in the ways that didn't, and assigned sleeping positions with the quiet authority of a man who has never in his life waited to be asked. Dara had taken the south-facing wall without being told. Breck had begun shifting rubble from the collapsed corner with the focused, workmanlike efficiency of someone for whom structural problems are an old argument and he knows how it ends.