The cold before first dawn along the upper dark grey rock rim of Hushwood didn’t arrive as a sudden chill. It soaked upward through the soles of Kezra Venn’s boots like slow leak through cracked cellar lime. She knelt three paces behind the blind rock nose of the old mineworkers’ ascent, her knees wedged into a shallow depression of weathered shale where mountain scrub clung to the seams. Below the shelf, five hundred upright feet of dark resin forest stretched away into the grey mist, the crowns of the iron-bark pines tossing in a steady, rolling wind that carried the pungent tang of bruised needle and damp lichen.
In her inner coat pocket, nestled flat against her left ribs inside its waxed oilcloth wrapper, her bonded survey notebook rested cool and quiet. Her active ledger stood at twenty-two completed circuits across four ecologies, with four live sites held in reserve. Her global cooldown was ready. Yet on this narrow mountain ledge, forty miles north of Kilnstep and three hundred paces above the road where Captain Hest Vale’s cavalry patrols were sweeping the lower timber tracks, the ledger’s potential offered neither warmth nor safety. Magic didn’t replace the physical soundness of an iron peg driven into stone.
