At one o’clock in the afternoon, Len and Cira walked together along the newly surfaced road that climbed the gentle river-bed fan between the Tram Ward and the lower switchbacks of the Star tower ridge.
The road had been fully rebuilt during the second week of the restoration. Geth Marr had sent two full quarry shifts with iron sledges, horse-drawn stone-crushers, and three wagons of coarse river gravel to fill the deep, mud-filled ruts where coal carts had bogged down for twelve years. The drainage ditches on either side had been cleared of rusted tin cans and rotten timbers, lined with dry dark rock fieldstone, and pitched to carry spring runoff smoothly into the central town under-road drain. The smell of fresh, damp gravel and crushed limestone hung heavy in the warm air. It mixed with the bitter resin of pine shavings where carpenter crews were replacing rotted fence-posts along the roadside orchards.
Walking down the center of the road, dropping from the upper terraces with the long, swinging stride of a veteran land-mapper, came Ivara Quill.
She was dressed in a patched, dark brown wool coat with the left sleeve cut off at the elbow, hemmed with neat, whip-stitched thread, and pinned flat against her ribs with an iron needle-point arrow. Balanced across her right shoulder was a heavy brass land-mapper’s level on a tripod of seasoned ash. Its leveling screws shone in the clear midday sun. In her right hand, she carried a six-foot measuring chain of forged…
