By early afternoon on the fifty-eighth day, the two recovered pottery wagons stood empty in the central aisle of the quarry shelter.
The unloading had been carried out with the swift, silent discipline of people who knew the fragility of baked clay. Along the dry limestone benches of the gallery, three hundred glazed tea bowls, eighty wide-rimmed stew pans, and sixty two-gallon pantry crocks sat stacked in clean nests of oat straw. Each vessel was marked with the three parallel chimney pipes of Maud Venn’s workshop, swept clean of road grit. Then she inspected for hairline fractures.
Not a single foot of straw was wasted. Not a single bowl was chipped.
Yet the thirty households of Kilnstep gathered around the long pine lantern table in the center of the cave. Then, nobody was admiring the glaze.
The damp air of the underground gallery was heavy with the smell of wet wool, animal fat dips, very thirsty barley, and cold limestone dust. Outside, the four Cairn Host soldiers had been gone for three hours, their horse tracks drying in the upland wind. But the threat of their return hung over the assembly like a heavy storm cloud banked against the Spine.
