At Kezra’s question, Adra Pike didn’t turn right away toward the cottages. She planted the iron point of her pruning hook into a crack between two dark grey rock flat stone slabs, leaned her weight against the ash shaft. Then she looked at Kezra with a gaze so direct and unsparing that it felt like a check rule laid across an uneven wall. The mountain wind fluttered the hem of her dark wool coat. It carried the scent of drying cabbage stalks, damp earth, and the sulfur tang of drift coal across the terrace. Behind them, the stone retaining wall caught the midday glare, streaming the meager heat it had stored since sunrise.
“He lives up the western terrace,” Adra said. She pointed with her chin toward a low stone tool house nestled beneath a wind-twisted larch tree, two hundred paces above the main irrigation water tank. “He shares the bench with an old prospector named Vennor whose legs are bad with vein ulcers. But before you walk up those steps, Mapmaker, I want an honest answer to a question you probably haven’t asked yourself since you left Kilnstep.”
Kezra held her ground, though her left knee gave a reflex twinge of fatigue. “Ask it, Adra. I haven’t walked eighty miles across broken mountains to dodge plain speech.”
