They marched hard through the long afternoon of the fifty-second day and broke camp before false dawn on the fifty-third. They took a high cross-ridge drover’s cut that shaved four miles off the southern wagon bend before dropping back onto their outward trail.
The country here was high, open highland pasture, scoured by a constant dry wind that smelled of wild thyme, sheep wool, and cold stone. By mid-morning of Day 53, the scrub juniper gave way to wind-bleached upland fescue and low outcrops of grey oolitic limestone that rose like ribs through the thin sod. Across a shallow dry wash ahead. There, the drover’s cut rejoined the main upland cart road, stood the low, square stone platform and rusted iron beam-frame of the Disused Roadside Weighing Station—Circuit Six in Kezra’s progression ledger, surveyed on Day 15 during their outward march from Kilnstep.
At the edge of the wash. There, the gravel ruts dipped toward a dry stone under-road drain, Yseld raised Fellis’s flat level wooden paddle chest-high.
STOP / HOLD LINE.
Kezra halted instantly beside the right wheel of the handcart. Her hand dropped to her tally cord as she logged the final hundred-pace bead before the under-road drain. For ten minutes the four of them crouched in the lee of a wild thorn-rose thicket. Meanwhile, Yseld swept the weighing platform, the collapsed roofless toll shed behind it, and the sunken rim of the old lime pit to the east through Kezra’s brass sighting lens.
