Chapter 23: Rook Makes His Move at the Summit Approach

The morning of the twenty-third day arrived with the particular inhospitable clarity that the Ashpeaks reserved for their upper elevations — thin air, hard light, and a cold so precise it felt less like weather than like a professional opinion. I woke before the others, as had become my custom, and spent twenty minutes making careful additions to my working chart while the sky went from black to the specific shade of grey that precedes colour.

The camp stirred in its usual sequence. Caelen first, by some internal mechanism that appeared to require neither effort nor consciousness. Bryndis second, with the immediate and complete wakefulness of someone whose nervous system had long since decided that transitional states were a liability. Siovhan not long after, already watching the upper approach with the patient attention of someone who had spent several centuries developing opinions about sightlines. Perenthia at a time she would have characterised as early and I would have characterised as considerably later than Perenthia believed, still carrying three pages of notes she had evidently continued writing in her sleep. Rook last of all, or apparently last, though I had ceased to assume that apparent wakefulness and actual wakefulness bore any reliable relationship in his case.

Aldrath did not wake so much as surface, which was the more accurate description of the process at this stage. He sat up in the cart with the careful deliberation of a man taking inventory of his own faculties before committing to them, and accepted the cup of water Perenthia brought him with something that would have been gratitude if he had retained sufficient strength to inflect it properly.