The wind coming off the high fescue pastures blew thin and cold across the limestone platform of the Disused Roadside Weighing Station. He carried the dry rattle of dead thistle heads against the rusted scale-beam.
Fellis Dain stood with his boots planted on the cracked eastern curb, his fingers resting on the heavy iron pinch-bar he had fetched from the handcart’s tool rack. Down in the brush-choked lime pit below the retaining wall, muddy water seeped through the exposed shale beds, trickling into pools the color of stale tea.
“It wouldn’t take more than an hour, Kezra,” Fellis urged, his young forehead furrowed with practical stubbornness. “The mortar in this upper course is lime and river sand—it gave way clean when the frost heaved. If I set the pinch-bar under the fourth header and pry while you chock the joints with dry limestone wedges from the ditch, we could pull that whole four-inch belly back flush inside your sixteen-pace line. We tamp dry gravel into the turf crack behind the curb, sweep the flat stone slabs. The book would see a straight edge again. It was your sixth circuit. It seems a terrible waste to throw away an approved Plot square twenty miles from home when Captain Vale has cavalry on the lower road.”
