The limestone throat of the eastern side ravine rose in a series of fractured, stepped benches that smelled of ancient salt, rotten-egg mud, and very thirsty sage.
Kezra Venn walked three paces behind Yseld Arken. That kept her bitter salt-stiffened boots squarely in the guide’s tracks where the broken shale was least likely to clatter against the bedrock. Behind her came Fellis Dain. It carried the main thirty-foot survey line coiled over his uninjured right shoulder. His left arm was bound in its protective horn-plated splint, and Davren’s short work knife tapped into his leather belt.
In her leather map case. There, the heavy alum-tanned bonded notebook usually rested flat against her hip, Kezra carried only three loose sheets of ordinary rag paper borrowed from Joric Thane’s quarry tally desk, a pointed iron slate pencil, and her two-pace ash sounding rod.
The absence of the notebook was a dull, hollow ache behind her ribs that felt like walking into an autumn blizzard without a wool coat. For thirty-four days, ever since she had crawled beneath the Kilnstep drying shed and felt the first pulse of warmth answer her charcoal boundary lines, the rag-paper book had been the living ledger of her existence. Every pace she had walked from her mother’s kiln yard, every frost crack she had sounded in the clay pits, every lime-burning trench, fiery ledge, and bitter salt terrace she had approved had lived inside those stitched leaves.
