Acting on Kezra’s realization, the expedition broke camp at first light on Day 68. That turned off the main timber highway onto an overgrown, half-forgotten sled track that wound west into the deep woods.
Yseld led the way, her eyes scanning the forest floor for the subtle heavy-duty scars that outlived ages of foresters. In mountain country, trees grew back in fifty years. But an old charcoal burner’s hearth left a permanent alteration in the soil that resisted root invasion for over a century.
Half a mile inside the timber margin, the sled track crested a gentle ridge. Then it dropped into a broad, circular clearing sixty paces across.
The clearing was noticeably different from the dense, root-tangled glades they had tried yesterday. At its center rose a low, flat-topped mound of compacted black charcoal dust and glass-fused kiln melted rock waste, twelve paces across, where colliers had burned pine cordwood thirty years earlier. Around the outer edge of the mound ran a deep, well-defined circular ditch—six feet wide and four feet deep—choked with dead bracken and dry pine needles.
Kezra slid down into the dry ditch, unslung her mason’s gouge. Then she scraped the leaf litter from the bottom and walls of the trench.
