The morning sun had cleared the jagged crest of the eastern ridge. He cast long, sharp shadows across the limestone floor of the stone animal pen.
Kezra knelt in the gravel near the northeast corner, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, using a short iron trenching trowel to scrape away the top layer of bitter salt silt along the outer base of the wall. Beside her, Fellis held a clean wooden sighting lath, checking the upright posture of the foundation stones against the weighted drop-line hanging from his tripod.
“Three inches down,” Kezra said, her trowel striking something tough and stringy that gave off a faint, pungent odor of bitter resin. “Here it’s.”
She cleared the soil with her fingertips. She showed a dark, gnarled root thick as a man’s wrist, angling diagonally beneath the dry-stacked foundation stones from the scrub terrace outside.
Fellis leaned down, squinting at the dark bark. “Desert hardwood. That stunted shrub sixty paces up the draw must have sent this runner searching for the dampness beneath the pen’s floor. That wood is dense enough to turn an axe edge once it dries.”
“And it’s alive,” Kezra said, resting her palm against the root. Through her skin, she could feel the faint, sluggish tiny blood vessel movement of moisture drawn from the deep gravel seams. “The boundary of an approved parcel must contain only inert stone mass, load-bearing timber, or authorized personnel. A living root crossing the outer edge plane binds the parcel to the living…
