On the high, windswept granite shoulder where the northern highway crossed the old country boundary of Rookvale, fourteen-year-old Tavi Rusk stood atop an ancient boundary cairn. He held a brass sighting tube to his eye.
The wind through the mountain pass was brisk, cold, and clean. It smelled of alpine frost, dry lichen. The pine-scented pitch of dwarf firs that clung to the crevices of the rock.
Beneath him, winding through the yellowing birch thickets of the Crow’s Throat gorge, three apprentice runners were running the three-mile mountain relay.
They were boys of thirteen and fourteen—the sons of tramway mechanics, canal lock-keepers, and quarry drillers—dressed in sleeveless running tunics of raw, unwhitened linen, with canvas shoes laced tight around their insteps and ankles. Each boy carried a six-pound leather pouch slung across his chest, weighted with rounded river pebbles from the weir to simulate the exact mass and inertial drag of official country dispatches.
Tavi adjusted the milled brass focus-ring of the sighting tube. His dark eyes tracked the lead runner’s rhythm as the boy took the hairpin turn around the third milestone.
“Check your lean, Peter!” Tavi shouted down through a cone-shaped copper speaking horn. His voice carried down the rock face with sharp, metal clarity. “You’re dropping your left shoulder into the gravel! Square your hips to the grade! Let Surefoot find the limestone before you commit your heel!”
