The stone way-shed at the limeworking crossroads sat on a low limestone rise where the upland pottery track intersected the old northern military road.
It was an ancient, roofed shelter built of rough-cut pale limestone blocks, open to the south but protected on the north and east by four-foot-thick walls pierced only by narrow arrow-slits. Decades ago, the country road wardens had used it as a toll post. Now it served as a neutral exchange point for mountain drovers, lime wagon drivers. The independent post-carriers who ran messages through the gaps in the Cairn Host pickets.
Kezra Venn halted her party eighty paces south of the crossroads behind a thicket of frost-bitten hawthorn.
The rain had slackened to a fine, drifting mist. But the limestone around the way-shed was dotted with flooded lime-settling pits. It was deep, box-shaped water tanks cut into the bedrock where water collected in milky, solid pools. A mounted patrol could easily hide four horses behind the ruined kiln arches to the east.
Yseld Arken didn’t need to be told what to do. Leaving her pack frame with Fellis, the guide unslung her short spear and glided into the brush with the soundless smooth speed of a wolf. She circled the flooded pits from the west, using the crumbling stone sills for cover, her eyes scanning the mud for fresh horseshoe tracks.
