The wind on the high quarry terrace smelled of cold shale, dry winter gorse, and the sour ash of long-dead sheep fires.
Fellis Dain didn’t let Kezra take another stride toward the open doorway of the shepherd’s hut. He kept the flat level wooden paddle held chest-high across her breastbone, his boots braced on the frost-heaved turf three paces back from the threshold.
“Wait,” Fellis murmured. He didn’t pitch his voice low into Kezra’s deafened left flank. Instead, he leaned across her right shoulder, angling his mouth toward her good ear so the dry autumn breeze wouldn’t steal the consonant sounds. “Look at the rafters above the top door beam, Kezra. A cut strap doesn’t hang that straight unless someone hung it on purpose, and nobody leaves an oiled hide metal tube where the morning sun hits the brass buckle.”
Kezra stood motionless, her right hand resting on the ash shaft of the two-wheeled handcart. Meanwhile, Yseld Arken closed up behind her left elbow. Through the soles of her travel boots, Kezra felt the slight, rhythmic tremor of Fellis shifting his weight. A physical sensation that had become as natural as breathing during their five days of marching from Saltglass. To her left ear, the open hillside was a flat, wool-padded hush. The dry rustle of the turf grass and the whistling breath of the wind through the cracked stones reached her only through her right side, thin and high, stripped of the deep, hollow deep ring that had once…
