Dawn arrived over Kilnstep not as light, but as a slow, cold silvering of the mist between the kiln chimneys.
The heavy mountain vapor that rolled down from the western limestone quarries smelled of damp coal soot, wet elder leaves, and the sour frost of unbaked marl. It settled into the hollows between the drying sheds, thick enough to blur the outlines of the roof timbers and deaden the scrape of a shoe against gravel to ten paces.
Kezra Venn knelt in the wet weeds beside the northern cut-stone anchor of Parcel Seventeen.
The isolated kiln stair stood four paces before her, dark and solid in the fog. It was an awkward, lonely piece of stonework. Four dressed limestone steps rising three feet into empty air, leading to a doorway that had burned down thirty years before she was born. Her grandfather had left the stone block standing when he cleared the charred timbers. That was because moving eight tons of shaped quarry limestone needed four oxen and a block-and-tackle that were better used hauling clay. For a generation, apprentice potters had sat on the third tread to eat their midday cabbage pasties out of the wind.
Now, the four steps and the two paces of dense foundation clay beneath them were bound to the seventeenth page of her notebook.
