Wagon wheels creaked against wet gravel as dawn spilled across the broken limestone boulders of Old Mill Ravine.
A thin, grey mist drifted off the canyon floor, smelling of wet slate and stagnant marsh water. Red cliffs rose eighty feet, squeezing the riverbed into a narrow throat barely wide enough for two carts.
Sera Thorne sat upright on the driver’s bench. Her hands held the braided reins with practiced ease, her knuckles ready.
Beside her knee, Storm-Pike rested against the sideboard. Its star-iron spearhead caught the morning light along the deep blood groove. Her scout eyes scanned every fissure along the cliffs.
Behind her, Mina sat cross-legged on a woolen blanket.
The girl’s breathing was slow, even, and deep. Around her small boots, a faint glaze of frost clung to the floorboards, humming with the clean chill of her newly awakened Jade Meridian Early foundation.
Kaelen Vance did not sit upright.
He lay stretched out in a hemp hammock strung between the wagon posts. An oiled-canvas parasol shielded his face from the rising sun.
