After supper on their third evening in the marsh, Iskren cleared the bowls from the long trestle table under the cookhouse tarp and unrolled a stiff square of greased elk-hide across the planks. To keep the corners flat in the damp breeze, he weighted them down with a whetstone, a tin salt-cellar, Osha’s inkhorn, and Pip’s returned brass wind-lamp.
Drawn on the hide in black gall-ink and red ochre was a jagged ribbon of deep limestone gorges cutting northeast from the hot-spring plateau toward the outer rim of the Wild Cradle.
“The low mule road through the gap is out of the question for you,” Iskren said, tracing a broad dotted line along the valley floor with a calloused forefinger. “If your Precentor Edris is moving a heavy bell-cart and a company of temple guards up from the south, he’ll have pickets at the toll bridge and the post-house by tomorrow noon. To beat a wagon train without horses, you have to cross the high limestone splits where wheels can’t go.”
He tapped three red X-marks drawn directly across the narrowest chasms of the upper gorge.
“There hasn’t been timber bridging up there since the miners pulled out thirty years back,” Chaska said, leaning over the table with her charcoal pencil between her teeth. “And those limestone slots drop two hundred feet to white water. Lilt can carry one person at a time if the wind isn’t howling down the funnel, but she can’t haul four women, camp gear, and…
