When no one needed water, Pip decided to make sure the camp was not dying in its sleep.
Ysabet watched from the low stone wall near the laundry tubs while scrubbing travel dirt out of Osha’s spare shift with her good left hand. Osha sat beside her on an upturned crate, holding the two surviving memory stones from the observatory in her lap and checking their wax wrappings for dampness. Across the grass, Ashaun was using her right hand and her teeth to braid a new hemp lanyard for her water horn, her translucent stone left forearm braced firmly against the timber post to hold the standing end taut.
Out on the warm peat bank below the boardwalk, a spotted draft newt as long as a farm wagon lay stretched on its belly in the sun, eyes shut and throat sac hanging slack between its front legs.
Pip crept up to the newt with all six legs low, moving with the stiff, careful deliberation of a hound approaching a snare. On its left flank, where the green clay patch met its older hide, the forked white-door mark was faintly visible. Since the marsh fire back in Bent Reed, Pip could tell when death was close to a body, though only by actual touch.
