Sleep in the Needlehouse map hall didn’t arrive as a gentle drift. It hit Kezra Venn like a dropped drop-gate.
For five hours she lay motionless on the double-folded wool blanket. Her cheek was pressed against the rough wool, her breathing deep, slow, and heavy. Beside her, Fellis Dain slept with his braced forearm propped on a bundle of dry archive linen. His chest rising and fell in rhythmic tiredness. Outside in the high courtyard, the wind whistled through the empty stone gutters. But inside the two-story vaulted stone hall, the air was still, cold, and quiet as a crypt.
In her dreams, she was back in Kilnstep. She walked the wet marl banks of the clay pits. Meanwhile, the autumn rain drummed against the wooden drying sheds. Davren was ahead of her. He ran lightly across the slick limestone footings, laughing back over his shoulder as he waved an unbroken clay jug. She tried to call out to him to watch his step—to tell him that the frost had loosened the third limestone tread—but her voice made no sound in the damp air. When she looked down at her own feet, she wasn’t wearing boots. She was standing on an open sheet of rag paper, and everywhere her toes touched the page, dark oak-ink bloomed outward in widening, sharp-angled squares, trapping her in a maze of sixty-four-pace lines that she could neither cross nor erase.
