She considered the caravan she and Kem had seen approaching. Wagons flying the banner of the imperial engineers were good news. The locals had been waiting for months for equipment and a better way to clear the blocked road without triggering yet more avalanches, as the first attempts to clear the road had done. Maybe the matter had become important enough for a prince-warden to provide oversight. But why would the wardens be involved, when clearing debris off the physical roadbed and making necessary repairs was the responsibility of the engineers? That didn’t make any sense.

The intendant had once told her that many of the decisions made in the imperial palace and its three advisory councils were for reasons that had more to do with princes and their in-laws jockeying for status within the palace hierarchy than with what would be best for the empire’s people. Then, having spoken, he had looked scared, and had opened all the doors and windows of his office to make sure no “shadow wardens” had been listening outside. He knew Elen wasn’t a spy because he and Aoving were the only people in all the world who knew about the viper. The intendant owed her his life because of the viper, and she owed hers to his discretion.

She passed the Boulders, climbing the steps up and over and then down onto the flat fields and neatly spaced orchards that surrounded the Halt. As always, she scanned the landscape for signs of Spore. This close to the Halt it was the job of a surveyor to ceaselessly patrol the land for telltale signs, so the weight of duty was lighter for her here than when she was on her circuit of the Moonrise Hills.

Her path met a cart track that paralleled the course of the Sul. It was a pleasant walk of about a mile to the earthworks. To the north of the river stood an old sarpa pen with its bronze-plated roof, but in ten years at the Halt she’d never seen a sarpa, much less one landing here to take a rest in its sandpit. Still, Halts were required by imperial law to maintain both a sarpa pen and a griffin mews.

At the earthworks, two canals branched off, one on either bank of the river. She passed the fenced-off oval of the burning ground and crossed the bridge over the northern canal.

The canals created a square moat all the way around the Halt, enclosing a great deal of useful farmland within the moat’s boundaries. There were also clusters of houses for people who could not get a license to live inside the road-ringed Halt itself. This time of year, the tidy gardens of the outer ward were mostly stripped, being readied for winter, with the quince still too green to harvest.