Chapter 2: The Shard Introduced, and a Fellowship Poorly Acquainted

The morning arrived with the particular grey decisiveness of early autumn, the kind that makes no promises about improvement. I had slept tolerably well, which surprised me, given that I had retired knowing myself to be in the company of at least one person whose history was more architecture than autobiography. Perhaps the cartographer's habit extends to one's rest: having taken sufficient notes on the immediate territory, the mind declines to agitate further until new data presents itself.

I was dressed and at the window with my journal before the yard below had fully committed to being visible.

The inn's rear garden gave onto a strip of flattened grass and, beyond it, the road that curved northeast toward the Greywood and, eventually, toward whatever the Ashpeaks held at their volcanic centre that required a fellowship of seven to address. A stable boy was moving about in the early murk, dealing with horses in the companionable silence of someone who preferred them to people. I did not blame him. Horses, in my experience, do not hold briefings at dawn or carry cursed gemstones in lead-lined cases.