Seven hours before Kezra Venn struck the slanted line across the fourth leaf of her survey notebook, the afternoon sun had beaten down with merciless, white intensity on the lower orchards of Kilnstep. The valley air was thick with the scent of ripening almonds, dry ditch-grass. The faint, rotten-egg draft of the irrigation channels that fed the lower melon fields. Out on the main highway, the heat shivered in see-through waves above the crushed limestone roadbed, but in the sunken ditches, the shadows were cool and smelled of damp river mud.
Vennik rode the dun mule, Gulla, along the dry bed of an abandoned irrigation canal. That kept his head low beneath the drooping, dusty branches of the untrimmed trees. Both boy and beast were caked in a thick, uniform crust of grey white chalk-stone dust from the White Gulch, their eyebrows, eyelashes, and clothing frosted white like apparitions emerging from a collapsed lime kiln. Gulla’s flanks were hollow and streaked with dried salt lather, her long ears drooping with tiredness. But the animal’s hooves picked their way across the dry silt with clockwork, unbending discipline.
Vennik had not closed his eyes in twenty-eight hours. His lips were cracked and bleeding from the scouring desert gale, his inner knees rubbed raw by the wooden pack saddle. But his right hand remained clamped tightly against the inner lining of his sheepskin coat. There, the notched juniper tally stick lay warm against his ribs. Every mile of that crossing had been an…
