The clatter of iron horseshoes on the dry cobblestones of the village square brought work to a sudden halt across the lower workshops. From the open bays of the pottery sheds, potters and apprentices stepped out into the crisp mid-morning sunlight. He wiped clay slip from their forearms with coarse rags.
The rider who reined in beside the communal well curb was neither a charging cavalry scout nor an armed guard in blackened plate. He was a civilian clerk of fifty-odd years, wearing a heavy gray woolen traveling coat with tarnished pewter buttons and a flat, brimmed felt cap pinned with the stamped lead badge of the district court guard’s office. His mount was a sturdy, mud-spattered bay gelding whose flanks heaved with the steady rhythm of a twelve-mile uphill trot from the guard post town at Crossford.
Kezra stood back in the deep shadow beneath the slatted wooden awning of the communal ware-stall, twenty paces from the well. Beside her, Yseld Arken leaned casually against an upright cedar post. Her hooked climbed staff planted firmly in the gravel. Without speaking, Yseld laid the flat of her left palm against Kezra’s left shoulder blade. The silent, reassuring contact that anchored Kezra’s deafened flank and warned her that two curious apprentices had gathered just behind her shoulder.
