The Pass

The last station of the Crown’s survey of the western Ashfall stood on the col of the pass, and Orla took it at the second hour after dawn with snow in the joints of the cairn.

The trooper had turned back at the snowline the afternoon before. He had sat his grey at the edge of the white and watched them go on into it, and when they were two hundred yards above him he had taken his cap off, once, and put it back, and turned the horse’s head down the hill. Corin had watched him all the way to the moss. Then he had said, “That’s the Bridge done,” and turned his back on the valley.

They had slept below the col in the lee of a rock the size of a byre, and in the morning the sky was clear from edge to edge and the whole…