By midday on Day 70, the expedition cleared the final switchback above the windfall and emerged onto a broad, level mountain bench cut into the upper western ridge of Hushwood.
The bench sat five hundred feet above the lower forest floor, perched on a shelf of solid dark grey rock bedrock where the air was noticeably cooler and the resin vapors were swept away by a steady subalpine draft. Decades earlier, colliers had cleared this terrace to establish a major inside production station. That left a wide, twenty-pace clearing surrounded by the familiar circular firebreak trench.
Kezra Venn stood on the rim of the black charcoal mound. She looked across the level circle with her sighting frame in hand.
“This is the friend bench Yseld remembered,” Kezra said, her voice lively with skilled satisfaction. “The colliers’ guild inside platform.”
Fellis set up the Two-Plumb-Thread Sighting Frame at the southwest corner, aligning the twin horsehair threads to true north with the glass-vial water tube. Through the unbending upright hairline, he paced out the sixteen-pace Plot square across the black ash floor. He drove white birch pegs at the four corners.
The square fit cleanly inside the circular firebreak trench with over two feet of clearance on every side. The ditch was bone-dry, choked with dead bracken, its clay walls fully free of invading pine roots.
