The scrub pasture on the northern skirt of Kilnstep was white with hoarfrost when Kezra Venn, Fellis Dain. Yseld Arken climbed the quarry track at sunrise on Day 61.
A bitter wind was blowing down from the fiery black ridges to the east. It carried the faint, cold scent of wet slate and frozen thistle stalks. Three hundred paces above the highest pottery roof. There, the ground leveled into a terrace of cracked limestone and sintered melted rock waste, stood the abandoned communal lime fire. Decades earlier, before the new kilns were built beside the river road, the village had burned raw limestone here to supply mortar for foundation walls and lime wash for the storage cellars. Now the fire drum was a roofless metal tube of dark, heat-glass-fused limestone and firebrick, ten feet high and twenty feet across, its charging door choked with dead brambles and dry fern roots.
Kezra paused at the edge of the terrace to slip the padded canvas shoulder straps of her pack frame off her wool coat.
Her eighteen completed circuits were etched into the bonded ledger against her ribs. Three at Step scale in Kilnstep, nine at Step and Plot across the Blackglass ridges and the Splitflint road, two more at Saltglass, and the two small four-pace defense squares she had approved beside Maud’s drying kiln during Hest Vale’s probe on Day 57. Quarter rank demanded twenty-four legal circuits, an eighty-mile nonstop walked route, five distinct ecologies, and one complex building survey. Every…
