By mid-morning, the shadow of the canvas tilt had shrunk to a narrow blue triangle along the north side of the wagon. The air rising off the Saltglass basin carried the sharp, bitter stench of dry bitter salt, hot iron tires, and mule dung baking in the sun.
Kezra sat on the tailboard with her boots braced against the ground, refusing Paxa’s third order to lie back on the blankets. Her head still throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache behind her left temple. But the sickening dizziness had subsided into a stiff, cautious balance. She kept her eyes fixed on the horizon and turned her shoulders instead of merely her neck. Each time, the world stayed upright.
Fifty paces to the east, near the shallow wash that served as the caravan’s drainage line, a knot of four wagon drivers had gathered around the communal cooking trench. Shouted curses floated across the dust. Clipped, high-pitched fragments that reached Kezra’s right ear like tin whistles over the steady drone of the desert wind.
“What’s the trouble at the trench?” Kezra asked, turning her torso so she could look Fellis in the face.
Fellis was sitting on an overturned salt barrel. He used a strip of oiled sharkskin to smooth the split edge of his ash measuring pole. He glanced up, shielding his eyes against the white glare. “The big hearth block slipped. You know that square chunk of black dark rock the quarry cutters use to shelter the bread embers from the…
