Lifthrasir stood alone at the far edge of the furrow, cracked from head to foot now, fine white lines running across her face and her throat and her bare arms, one for every calamity she had let fall, and the deepest of them were still bleeding. Behind her, on the western ridge, her sisters hung in the air with their silver wings spread.
At her shoulders, vast and dark and swaying, stood Kir One and Kir Two, and though the Harvest had left them thinner and slower, their great obsidian faces turning this way and that with none of their old certainty, they still stood there. They had been made to protect her a hundred years, and while she lived, they would not stop.
Noah walked toward them across the black-gold soil with the Hoe in his hands and blood dried on his face, and stopped a few paces from the furrow. He...knew Kir One well, and that was the hard part.
