The high mountain wind shifted from the north as the afternoon wore on, driving plumes of pale white chalk-stone dust across the dark rock terrace and rattling the canvas hood of the handcart. Inside the sheltered pocket behind the tailboard, Kezra Venn sat with her knees drawn up. Her wool scarf tucked was tight beneath her collar, her fingers resting lightly on the fifth leaf of her open survey notebook.
Fellis Dain knelt beside her on the gravel, a mug of cold tea resting between his boots, his dark eyes fixed on the neat, ruled columns of the master parcel registry.
“Look at the fifth line, Kezra,” Fellis murmured. He pointed a blunt, calloused finger at the parchment. “When your mother took the hammer to the limestone cube behind kiln three, she killed the northern square. But she didn’t touch the partner.”
Kezra looked down at the dark, unfaded dark oak-ink. There, framed within its crisp double-ruled boundary, the second Kilnstep parcel glowed with the quiet, persistent soft glow of approved earth-measuring power:
On Day 10 of her journey, forty days ago when her class was green and her ambition was eager to prove its new Plot scale, Kezra had surveyed two next-door sixteen-pace squares at the abandoned limeworks. To test the same-time shifted weight mechanics without disrupting the village, she had paired the northern lime-slaking yard with the southern settling terrace fifty paces away. She had walked both perimeters with her sounding rod, measured the depth of the underlying…
