The cellar hatch slammed open against the turf bank with a sharp crack of wet oak, and Tessa came out into the cold morning air with her teeth set on edge. The slate was clamped tight against her ribs under her left arm, its sharp stone corners biting through her homespun smock, but she did not shift her grip.
Above her, the sky over the valley was the color of a wet slate shingle, pale and flat and heavy with unfallen snow. Across the courtyard, the air was thick with a white cloud of pulverized lime.
“Pim!” Edren’s voice came from the shelter of the wood-shed, cracked by thirty years of mine damp. “Pim! Stay down under the eaves!”
Tessa cleared the kitchen door-sill in three strides. Her boots hit the flagstones just as dust rolled back from the west curtain. It smelled of scorched iron and black powder. Through the fog of lime, she saw the gap in the upper parapet: a neat bite taken out of the three-foot ashlar wall, where four crenels had been sheared off as cleanly as if an enormous stonecutter’s chisel had struck the ridge. Broken chunks of limestone lay scattered across the gravel.
