The Council Ledger
The Upper City Watch reached the clifftop long after the fighting, then held the party overnight while the Harbor Council disputed bodies, jurisdiction, and responsibility. At dawn, Ossin brought the ledger before the full council and used the ledgerhand glass to reveal the altered entries threaded through two years of Varnhall Company manifests. Three council members walked out as he worked; one was a Varnhall man, and he never returned. The council took the ledger, but Ilsevir had spent the night copying what mattered and kept those copies. With the iron tag, ciphered orders, the Falomir Gorge carvings, and the old Journal page spread around a cold breakfast, he traced every known movement north toward Kaldrek. He concluded that the Kindling Rite had worked for at least six years, perhaps longer, and that the hidden wall in the East Mine was not the beginning of its work but merely the point where it had become visible.
A Letter North
Sister Raina's body proved harder to settle than the council's paperwork. Brask wanted Pyatt told and the body returned to Warden's Watch, while Yenn argued that the truth of Raina's betrayal would only add cruelty to what the sixteen-year-old had already lost. Brask finally wrote that Raina had died fighting on the clifftop at Marrow's Cliff, which was true, and Kettra signed the letter without being asked. The body left north aboard a coaster under a Harbor Council seal. That night Ilsevir learned that Mother Ash's heavy, plain warm coin answered to a matching coin somewhere else: a spoken message could emerge from its pair once each day, though he could not locate it. He kept the coin apart from his other things afterward, checking it more often than he admitted.
Across Greywake Moor
At midday the party left Marrow's Cliff with a Harbor Council letter of passage and took the south road across Greywake Moor toward the fishing villages at the fjord mouth. The moor was all low gray heather, wet hollows, old cairns, and a sky pressed close overhead; after eight days hemmed in by streets and cliffs, the open view brought little comfort. Two hours out, six hungry feral dogs rushed them from the heather. The fight ended quickly, but its plain necessity left a worse taste than the stranger violence they had already faced. Yenn killed three dogs and remained angry long after the danger had passed. A bite caught Faro's forearm, and Brask healed it before the party continued; Faro complained that it was his lute arm, though it was not.
The Preparation
That evening they camped in the lee of an old cairn while the moor darkened around them. Ilsevir returned to Mother Ash's final certainty: she had believed in what lay beneath Hollowpeak, and her work had not been a completed plan but preparation for something still to come. The mine, the tags, the frost beasts, the clifftop ritual, and six years of northern cargo all looked different in that light. Kettra asked whether the party had made matters worse by opening the East Mine's hidden wall and reaching Warden's Watch while its vault was emptied. No one could give her an answer. Faro finally set aside blame and pointed to the only direction the evidence allowed: Kaldrek, where Torvin had two hundred people and a hole in the ground. They agreed to reach the coast, find a boat, and go north to Kaldrek, after which Brask insisted that everyone sleep.