The steam rising from the battered iron pot smelled of fat mutton, boiled leeks, and coarse mountain salt.
In the shelter of the dry-stone sheep wall, sixteen-year-old Talla poured the hot broth into Maud Venn’s small clay cup. Then it pressed it into Kezra’s cold hands. The girl’s knuckles were red and wind-chapped. Her sheepskin sleeves were tied at the wrists with lengths of braided flax to keep out the morning draft.
“Drink it while it’s bubbling, Kezra,” Talla urged, sitting back on an upturned wooden trough. She kept her voice at a steady, ordinary pitch. But her dark eyes darted constantly between Fellis and the heavy ash shafts of the handcart. “My father brought three sacks of dried mutton up to the fold before the horsemen sealed the lower lane. We have enough to feed eighty ewes and four hungry travelers for a week, if the frost doesn’t freeze the trough.”
Kezra drank. The hot broth burned the roof of her mouth, cutting through five days of dry travel rations and bitter salt grit. Beside her, Fellis sat with a cracked wooden bowl between his knees, blowing on the surface with the fierce, focused appetite of a nineteen-year-old who had hauled three hundred pounds of cart over twenty miles of broken terrace on half-rations.
