On the twentieth morning following the dawn crossing, Len Vey walked through the high, arched double doors of the former country main school in the upper district of the Tram Ward.
He was on his own two feet now. He walked with a slow, measured, deliberate gait that kept his balance point lined up squarely over his pelvic basin. His boots—cleaned of mountain mud and greased with fresh animal fat from Martha Holt’s kitchen—struck the dry pine floorboards with the clean, ringing snap of an active carrier. His left forearm was still wrapped in its rigid ash-wood splints, locked still in a sling of dark, tightly woven black wool that his sister Cira had sent across the border with the second postal freight wagon. But Carrying Balance held his spine straight. That kept the twenty pounds of dead uneven weight from pulling his neck out of square. His two cracked ribs gave only a dull, faint twinge whenever he climbed a stair tread.
Beside him walked Urel. It carried a heavy canvas tool roll under his arm, an iron cold-chisel tucked into his belt. A twelve-pound steel mason’s sledge balanced across his right shoulder.
The former schoolhouse had not heard the sound of children reciting spelling tables or shape proofs in twelve years. In the fourth month of the Great War, Chancellor Morn’s town commissars had evicted the schoolmasters, torn out the pine benches to build barricades. Then he converted the central assembly hall into the town branch of the…
