Yseld didn’t stop until she had rounded the stable wall. There, the smell of wet straw and manure was thickest and the north draft blew hard against the cedar shingles.
The alleyway was four paces wide, pinched between the stables and the fiery rock face of the notch. Two pack-frames lay in the mud beside an unhinged timber gate, their ash struts splintered where a heavy cart wagon had backed into them. From here, the windows of the common room were thirty paces away and hidden by the roofline. Anyone stepping out of the taproom would have to crunch twenty yards across frozen gravel before their ears could catch a whisper.
Paxa emerged from the harness shed a moment later, wiping her forearms on a square of boiled toweling. A faint green smear of crushed plantain leaf stayed beneath her fingernails, mixed with the sharp tang of rectified spirit.
“Fellis has his chin propped on his chest,” Paxa said. She stepped into the lee of the wall beside Kezra. “He’s trying to sleep upright on a fir cask because he’s too stubborn to admit that lying down on a pallet makes his shoulder throb. I told the stable boy to leave him alone unless the roof catches fire. What did the ore-drivers say, Yseld?”
