The early afternoon sun beat down through the bleached canvas awning. That turned the stale air under the handcart into a dry, breathless oven. Dust from the horse lines drifted between the wagon wheels in sluggish yellow eddies. He smelled of bitter salt ash, dry straw, and old saddle grease.
Kezra Venn carefully lifted the second river pebble from the bottom left corner of the rag sheet. She turned the parchment over against the ash planks of the tailboard. Then she smoothed the back with the heel of her hand. The paper crackled under her fingers, stiff with dried sizing and months of arid storage in the brass tube.
On the reverse side of the letter, drawn in pale walnut-dark oak-ink with a sharpened reed pen, sat three paragraphs of dense, tiny block script with a series of precise height profiles and map point tables.
“He didn’t write this at Joric’s desk,” Kezra murmured, angling her good right ear toward the page as she brought her brass magnifying glass into position. Her left ear felt like a plug of lead had been driven into the canal, returning only the faint, clockwork hum of her own pulse. “The ink is mountain gall, made from oak apples and copperas. The reed was cut from water-rush, not valley cane. He wrote this in Alderfast before he ever scrambled down the chimney to Saltglass.”
