Morning broke over Splitflint Notch with a thin, brittle sunlight that melted the frost from the hostel slates without warming the fiery stone beneath.
It was Day 20. The forced rest day that Paxa Sel had carved out of their journey with the cold power of a physician’s razor knife. Fellis Dain was forbidden from lifting anything heavier than a tin broth cup, Yseld had gone down to the paddock to help the wagon drivers inspect their harness pins. The Knife Ridge rose above the compound like an impassive grey wall. They held its breath until tomorrow.
Kezra Venn had tried sitting still for two hours after sunrise. She had oiled Davren’s work knife, sharpened the brass nib of her dividers against a wet slate hone. Then she scraped the dry mud from her gaiters. But by mid-morning, the stillness in the common room had grown as choking as wool smoke.
She carried her iron-shod sounding rod and her field notebook. She stepped through the eastern kitchen door into the hostel’s walled kitchen garden.
The garden occupied a level, sheltered terrace wedged between the main hostel building and the eastern cliffs. It was roughly twenty paces across, bordered by a low, drystone windbreak of dark stone boulders that kept the fierce northern drafts from freezing the soil. Inside the enclosure, four neat rows of crinkled winter cabbage, three beds of pale upland leeks. A plot of withered turnip greens sat in deep, dark fiery loam that had been hauled up…
