Kezra Venn didn’t hesitate. The black wooden triangle was the expedition’s highest visual alarm. The signal that enemy forces were within striking distance and that all civilian surveying was suspended.
She dropped into a low crouch against the hardpan, signaling Fellis and Paxa to back the handcart into the deep shadow of the drystone under-road drain wall. Together with Fellis, she scrambled up the fractured dark grey rock shelf, crawling on hands and knees through the stunted juniper scrub until she reached Yseld’s vantage point.
The route finder lay flat on her stomach behind a slab of weathered rock, her ash spear resting beside her right shoulder. She didn’t turn her head as Kezra slid into the hollow beside her. She simply pointed down through a narrow natural gap where the spruce canopy parted over the valley.
Half a mile below the upkeep yard, winding along the lower contours of the mountain, ran the graded military timber road that led from the Brackenford depot toward the upper Spine.
Rising through the slanted evening light was a long, yellowish plume of fine clay dust.
Through the quiet dusk air came a sound that made Kezra’s pulse race. The rhythmic, muffled thud of shod iron cavalry hooves striking hard gravel at a sustained trot, with the faint, rhythmic jingle of bit chains and iron sword sheaths.
