Dusk settled over the upper mineworkers’ shelter with the swift, icy finality of the high subalpine. The wind dropped to a low, mournful whisper through the roof edges of the timber sleeping hut. The stars began to appear above the limestone flutes of the Spine. It was hard, cold chips of diamond scattered across an indigo sky.
Inside the sleeping hut, a small fire of dry cedar root burned in the stone hearth. It cast dancing orange shadows across the rough-hewn log walls. Paxa had given Fellis a hot bowl of very thirsty barley broth laced with three drops of willow spirit-extract to dull the throbbing in his hand. The nineteen-year-old was now asleep on a low bunk of dried bracken, his braced left arm pillowed carefully on a folded horse blanket.
Outside on the stone terrace, Kezra stood beside the cold spring trough. She stared down into the dark deep pit of Hushwood.
A terrible, crushing weight of guilt sat in her chest like a lump of cold melted rock waste. She looked down at her hands—whole, uninjured, the skin merely callused by tools—and thought of the sound Fellis’s bones had made. Just then, the deadfall struck.
She had brought him here. They had left Kilnstep twelve weeks ago. Then, Maud had stood on the drying shed doorstep and warned her. He is nineteen years old, Kezra. He has never been five miles from a pottery kiln. A rope rigger is not an adventurer.
