They had spent the night in cold, fireless silence ten paces below the narrow pinch of the rock turn, huddled beneath the handcart’s canvas hood with wool blankets pulled over their heads.
No one had struck a spark. No one had whispered. Even the tea kettle had remained cold in the pannier, its lid muffled with a strip of greasy rag to prevent any brass clink from carrying up the quarry chimney. When Kezra’s watch ended at midnight, Paxa had taken her place at the wheel. She sat with her fingers resting against the spoke so that any footstep shaking through the limestone ramp would register in her palm before it made a sound in the air.
Now, as the grey, freezing dawn of Day 55 seeped down the limestone slot, the frost clung like salt crystals to the iron rims of the cart and the coarse hairs of their sheepskin collars.
Fellis Dain lay flat on his stomach in the gravel of the footpath, his chin propped on his forearms, barely six inches from the hair-thin copper strand.
Kezra knelt behind him against the left limestone boulder. Her cold hands were tucked deep into her armpits to keep the blood in her fingers. Yseld Arken crouched on the right side of the trail. Her hooked climbed staff laid flat on the stones and her hunting knife drawn, its steel blade dull and dark with animal fat to prevent any morning glow.
