The south wind carried the dry, bitter-salt taste of Saltglass across the gravel plain as the expedition took up the march.
Kezra Venn walked on the right side of the grey mule, her hand resting lightly on the ash shaft of the pack frame, her boots falling into the steady, clockwork rhythm of the road. Behind her left shoulder, Yseld Arken matched her pace step for step, her staff clicking in the gravel, her eyes flicking periodically to the skyline where the two Cairn Host scouts followed three hundred paces to the rear.
The question Yseld had asked at the pack frame had followed them out of the camp like a third scout.
The dry gravel plain seemed to stretch without boundary toward the southern horizon. It was flanked on the west by the jagged fiery castle walls of the Spine and on the east by low, crumbling ridges of pale bitter salt marl.
Every two miles, the cart ruts passed the skeletal remains of old freight transport. An abandoned wagon axle half-buried in fiery dust, its iron bands rusted to paper-thin scales. The bleach-white ribs of an ox that had died of thirst decades ago. Or the stone foundation of an ancient patrol shelter whose timber roof had burned during the border wars.
