The bitter salt flats of Saltglass were still the color of cold animal fat. Just then, the four of them stepped across the northern rim track before dawn.
Kezra Venn walked on the right side of the two-wheeled handcart, her palm resting lightly on the iron-shod ash shaft. Meanwhile, Fellis Dain took the main front yoke between his shoulder straps. Every hundred paces, her left thumb pushed a boxwood bead down the waxed linen tally cord tied to her belt loop. One hundred paces of coarse salt-crust over broken shale. Two hundred paces where the old quarry drainage ruts bit through the frost-stiffened greasewood roots. Each bead was not merely a distance note for a paper sketch. It was a nonstop, personally walked thread tying the Saltglass basin back toward the upland crossroads and the distant clay pits of Kilnstep.
Behind her left shoulder, two paces back and half a pace out, Yseld Arken matched her stride without making a sound.
Since the sixty-four-pace road exchange five days ago had stripped the bottom register from Kezra’s left ear, the world on that side had become a deceptive, cotton-stuffed quiet. High sounds still crossed the bone—the dry tin clink of Paxa Sel’s medicine vials in the cart bed, the sharp wheeze of a pack mule shaking its bridle bits, the crisp tock of Fellis’s measuring pole striking a limestone cobble. What vanished on her left was everything low and heavy. The deep rumble of the handcart’s left iron tire rolling over…
