They entered the meadow in a close file, with Ashaun in front and Chaska walking beside Lilt at the rear so the sandray’s folded fins would not sweep the broader drifts of stems.
For the first fifty paces, the sensation was merely strange.
Wherever their boots moved and their warm breath escaped through the wool scarves tied across their noses, the bone-colored bells parted with a soft, papery rustle. Pale golden-grey pollen rose in lazy eddies around their knees. Walking through the first drift felt like stepping through a crowded barn after the cattle had already been driven out: a sudden whiff of warm milk, a flash of a red flank turning in mud, the brief, startled thump of a calf’s heart, and then nothing but cold mountain grass again.
Behind Ysabet, Osha stumbled once when a low cluster of flowers opened beside her rawhide-patched shoe and released the sudden, phantom smell of woodsmoke and boiled mutton from some drover’s camp fire that had burned out ten autumns ago. Ashaun steadied her share of the oak archive case with her right hand and rapped Suth’s staff once against a stone to keep the scholar’s eyes on the ground in front of her feet.
