Location:The Gate — the valley mouth: the wall, the gap, the verge, the east end of the wall
Date/Time:Night of 28 → 29 Frostforge 9943 AZI, Quenchday into Grindday
Realm:Lower Realm
A chain makes a sound when the people on it shift in their sleep, and three hundred people do not lie still all night. Meifen had been hearing it since dark.
She stood at the wall a pace east of the gap with her forearms on the top stones, where she had stood the day before, and the Freehold's fires were sixty paces off on the verge in a long low line, burning furze that came over the wall sharp and sweetish on the cold. The knights slept between the fires in their cloaks with their horses picketed behind, and behind the knights, in the dark, the children sat on their chain, unseen and not unheard.
The day before, in the gap, with nothing in front of her and him twenty paces off, he had asked the question again, slowly, for somebody who might not have understood it the first time.
