The mountain rang with the sound of carts for eight hours. By dusk, forty freight carts and a hundred and twenty pack mules had gone down the road with the first loads. Some carried rice and cured meat. Others carried iron tools or silver wrapped in burlap. Old Chen had made a place for each of the sixty-four hamlets on a slate by the ramp. When a driver called out his village, a girl put a mark beside it.
There was still food in the deeper bays. The crews were taking what they could to the lower storehouses before the frost made the ramps slick. They wanted the food down before the next storm. Old Chen had already sent riders to ask the villages for more oxen.
The twelve children he had brought down from Peak Four were warm and fed by the time the first loads went out. At the freight ramp, relatives who had come up from the villages took six children into their arms. Old Chen sent the other six and a list of their names with a wagon crew bound for their home hamlets.
The girl who’d helped her brother still held the towel she’d used to bind his ribs. Her mother tried to take it, and the girl wouldn’t let go. Qiao Fen brought her a dry one for the road. She waited until the girl took it before she went back to the work floor with Pei Jing. With the cauldrons cold, she opened…
