While Daro Kesh and Osen Tal unhitched the shivering mule in the lee of the woodshed and rubbed its flanks down with dry straw, Mother Renn carried a basket of turnips and salt fish into the small hospice kitchen at the rear of the building and bolted the window shutters. She didn’t take off her wool shawl until she had held her stiff, knotted fingers over the stove lid for a full minute.
At yesterday’s dawn, the old incense seller had driven her cart ten miles down the lower drovers’ track toward the river crossroads above Oran. It used the peddler’s pass she had carried for forty years to test whether the roads were open and whether the town apothecaries had spring ash in stock. Now, as Ilyra, Daro, Mina, and Seyun gathered around the scrubbed pine kitchen table, Renn laid three small paper packets of low-grade ditch-reed ash on the wood and shook her head.
“That’s all the ash I could buy across four stalls at the river crossroads without having a trial court guard follow my cart back up the creek,” Renn said. Her voice dropped to the low, practical register of a woman who had survived the Balance siege thirty years ago.
