The heat of mid-afternoon had settled into a dense, shaking hum that made the canvas tilts of the freight wagons groan on their ash bows. Inside the shadow beneath the second wagon’s awning, the air was warm, stale, and thick with the smell of sheepskin wool, dry earth. The faint, bitter stone dust that seeped through every weave of cloth like an invisible smoke.
Kezra drifted in that shallow, murky borderland between deep tiredness and waking awareness—a state where the mind registers physical sensations without the immediate urgency to interpret them.
In her sleep, she had been walking the limestone threshold of the drying shed back in Kilnstep. She felt the cold morning mud of the upland clay pits squelching beneath her boots. Meanwhile, Davren called out pace counts from the road. Her mother Maud was standing near the kilns, checking the cooling pots with a knuckle tap and lecturing her on the proper care of leather harness straps. In the potter’s creed, neglect was a worse sin than clumsy throwing. A pot that cracked in the firing was merely lost clay. But a dry harness strap that snapped on a mountain haulage incline could cost a team of oxen and a driver’s life.
