The camp fire bowls had burned down to mounds of dull crimson coal. Just then, the whispers began to circulate among the wagons on the night of the thirtieth day.
Kezra Venn stood by the water trough near the blacksmith’s anvil. She held an empty wooden bucket. Meanwhile, Fellis Dain pumped the iron handle with rhythmic, creaking strokes. The night was bitter cold, the mountain draft whistling through the spokes of the heavy freight wheels. But the heat had done nothing to cool the feverish talk running through the tents. The forty-two stranded souls of Joric Thane’s caravan had spent four days trapped beside the deep pit. He watched the water barrels drop two inches every morning, and in the absence of work, their minds had begun to manufacture miracles.
“I saw her open the book by the lantern,” a gruff voice muttered from beneath the canvas tilt of wagon four. It was Kroll, a veteran wagon driver with a silver ring in his left ear who drove the heavy iron-ore heavy cart. He was sitting on a tongue-box with his pipe between his teeth, speaking to three other drivers who huddled around an iron fire bowl filled with glowing mule dung. “A leather cover no bigger than an exchequer’s Bible. But when she touched the brass latch, the paper shone like a cat’s eye in a dark cellar. My cousin heard of a high mapper in the southern capital who took three hundred head of fattened bullocks, folded them…
