Before leaving the weighing station, Kezra Venn walked up the stone path to the keeper’s toll cottage. A squat, slate-roofed building nestled against the limestone bank where the road branched toward the timber forest.
Inside, the cottage smelled of dried peppermint, wood-ash, and old leather boots. The station keeper, an elderly widower named Harlen who had spent forty years collecting freight duties for the country road commission, sat beside a small iron stove mending a harness strap with an awl and waxed hemp thread. His hands were stiff with rheumatism. But his eyes were bright as he recognized Kezra’s leather coat.
“The girl who measured the scale pit,” Harlen said, setting his awl on the table. “Joric’s wagon drivers said you came back from the salt desert with your ears full of quiet.”
“One ear, Master Harlen,” Kezra said with a faint smile. She sat on the bench opposite him and positioning herself so her good right ear caught his low voice. “The right one hears well enough to catch a wagon driver grumbling about a toll.”
She unbuckled her waterproof portfolio. Then she drew out a clean, inked paper height plan of the weighing platform.
“I brought you a corrected safety plan for the station,” Kezra said, laying the sheet across the clean oilcloth table. “We mapped the foundation during our first survey. Here, two paces north of the scale pit, runs an old buried iron tie-rod slot that the original builders left behind when they dismantled the crane…
