Dusk settled into the drying shed with the smell of damp pine shavings, cool clay dust, and the sharp, stone tang of river sand.
Kezra struck a sulfur match against the brick door post and touched the flame to the wick of the three-burner brass lantern hanging from the center rafter. The yellow light pooled across the broad pine worktable, lighting up the three heavy clay stilts she had laid down to keep the rolled parchment sheets from snapping shut. Outside the open shed doors, the village of Kilnstep was quieting down for the evening. The smoke from eighteen hearths drifted blue and flat between the straw roof roofs. Meanwhile, the steady, rhythmic scrape of Maud’s clay wire echoed from the cellar across the yard.
Yseld Arken unbuckled the iron clasps of her heavy leather portfolio. Then she drew out a long, narrow strip of waxed land-mapper’s canvas. It wasn’t a town road chart with neat red towns and painted stagecoaches. It was an old military cross strip, drawn in black soot-ink and olive wash. Its edges frayed and was bound with green thread.
“Clear the table,” Yseld said, unrolling the strip and pinning the southern corner down with a heavy three-sided firing prop. “If you want to understand the shape of the northern barrier, you have to look at the ground the way the old corps looked at it fifty years before Marshal Krail bought his first company of lancers.”
