Paxa Sel didn’t raise her voice, but her fingers clamped down on the ash crossbar of the handcart with the grip of a vice.
“Step back, Kezra,” the healer said. “Take your hands off that sighting tube and sit down on the turf.”
Kezra frowned, her fingers hovering near the leather strap. To her left ear, Paxa’s voice was stripped of its lower chest deep ring, arriving thin and reedy as if filtered through a wool blanket. “Paxa, I need to take a bearing on the eastern limeworks road before the sun clears the high ridge. If Captain Vale has outriders on the march—”
“Captain Vale’s outriders will be there in an hour, and they will be there at noon,” Paxa cut in. She stepped closer, angling her face toward Kezra’s good right ear, her grey eyes hard and unbending. “You have marched five straight days from Saltglass on two-thirds rations. You pulled that handcart over twenty miles of broken limestone terraces. You surveyed two complete Step circuits on the road bluffs two nights ago, and tomorrow before dawn you’re going to climb down a shale ravine into an occupied village to execute a razor-sharp terrain exchange under the noses of four armed sentries.”
