The high quarry terraces were not meant for wheels. They had been hacked out of the mountain a century ago by men who worked with iron sledges, wooden rollers, and gravity slides, carving level ledges thirty paces wide into the sheer face of the limestone ridge before abandoning them to frost and thistle.
By the second hour of the afternoon, every muscle across Kezra Venn’s shoulders felt as if it had been beaten with an ash club.
The handcart climbed in fits and starts. At every upright step between benches—some four feet high, some six—they had to halt. Paxa and Fellis would unhook the heavy leather panniers. She carried the water cask, the tool sacks, and the iron pinch-bar up the fractured stone by hand. Then Kezra and Yseld would seize the empty ash shafts, Fellis would brace the axle from below with his shoulder, and together, on a count of three, they would heave the two-hundred-pound frame up over the stonework lip.
One, two, three—heave.
The iron tires would scrape against the limestone riser with a screech that sent sparks flying into the dry moss, the wheels would bite into the upper gravel. Paxa would right away jam the oak chocks behind the hubs before the cart could roll back down the slope.
