The groan of the rear left wheel was not loud, but to Kezra Venn’s right ear it sounded like an oak beam snapping under the weight of an alpine snowslide.
The heavy mountain wain had rolled twelve paces across the flags. Its axle hubs slid through their fresh sheep fat with whisper-soft ease, until its iron-banded tire struck the jagged raised lip of a frost-heaved limestone slab. In the upland clay of Kilnstep, late autumn slow leak always worked its way beneath the unmortared paving stones. The first hard freeze swelled the trapped moisture. It lifted the flat stone slab three inches above its neighbors like a crooked tooth.
The seasoned white-oak felloe groaned under the sudden impact, the three-inch iron tire scraping sideways across the rock with a harsh, screeching shudder that sent a shower of powdered stone and dry moss across the mud.
In the southern gate of the yard, the younger Cairn Host infantryman, Orven, snapped his head around.
For one frozen second, his eyes stared blankly at the wide, empty space where the first two pottery wagons had stood thirty heartbeats earlier. The broad flat stone slabs lay bare, crisscrossed with faint tracks of dark grease, damp earth, and crushed oat straw. Then his gaze snapped to the center of the yard. There, the third wagon stood tilted on its axle. Then he followed the thick, taut line of animal fat-soaked hemp leading directly into the open western gap of the wall.
