The shadows of the handcart wheels were stretching long and thin across the gravel terrace when Kezra Venn sat down to write her dispatch to Maud. The western sun had dipped behind the jagged crest of the Saltglass hills, throwing the camp into cool violet shade. Even so, the heat of the day still radiated up from the limestone flat stone slabs beneath her boots. Across the compound, the evening cook-fires were just catching. It sent up thin blue plumes of sage-smoke that drifted low across the dust.
She laid a fresh sheet of unbonded rag paper across the ash tailboard, dipped her bone dip-pen into the horn bottle of carbon ink. Then she sat with the nib hovering half an inch above the clean, stringy surface.
Her first impulse—the warm, desperate, protective instinct of an older sister who had spent eighteen months watching her mother wither under the agony of an empty chair—was to soften every sharp edge of the truth. She wanted to wrap Maud in gentle assurances, to smooth away the terrors of the alpine winter, and to paint a bright, comforting portrait of a boy safe and thriving in the high valleys.
In her mind’s eye, Kezra saw the kitchen in Kilnstep. The three pottery wheels arranged in a row by the south window, the drying shelves smelling of damp grey clay and wood-ash slip. The empty stool where Davren used to sit with his carving knives, shaping handles and trimming foot-rings with restless, impatient care…
