The silence in the High Crag bunkhouse stretched for nearly thirty seconds. It was broken only by the crackle of pine knots in the stone fireplace and the distant clink of a hammer in the forge shop shed outside.
Brenn looked at the six silver crowns on the table. Four silver bits a day was double the rate the valley merchants paid for dressed curb-stones, enough to buy two sacks of winter wheat and a tub of salted herrings for a family. But quarrymen in the Spine didn’t live to sixty by jumping at silver without measuring the depth of the shaft.
“You’re small for a Quarter Mapmaker,” Brenn observed bluntly. He looked at Kezra’s slender frame and calloused hands. “The royal mappers Krail sends up from the capital travel with six bodyguards and two riding mules. They don’t walk into a bunkhouse smelling of sweat and stone dust.”
“They don’t know stone,” Yseld Arken said from the doorway, her voice flat and cold. “This girl walked eighty miles across the high Spine. She mapped the Needlehouse map hall across two floors and twenty-nine paces of underground vaults in twenty-four hours. She earned Quarter rank. Then, she retired the address so Krail’s catapults couldn’t target the archive. She knows stone better than your father did.”
