Kezra rose from the water tank bench with deliberate care. She tested her weight against her left knee before taking a stride. The joint felt stiff and cold. But the ugly, rhythmic fluttering in her calves had quieted into a manageable ache. Yseld picked up her climbing staff. She fell in two paces to Kezra’s left. Meanwhile, Fellis Dain walked on her right with his wooden rule tucked under his good arm. Paxa followed three paces behind, her satchel closed, giving Kezra the space to make the final approach on her own terms.
The forty stone risers leading up the western terrace were narrower than the main basin stair, cut from dark, hard dark grey rock that had been rubbed smooth in the center by hundreds of passes of hobnailed boots. Each step was barely eight inches wide. It was flanked on the uphill side by a low drainage channel lined with overlapping slate plates to catch runoff from the upper cabbage beds. The stonework was unmortared. But every stone had been dressed with an adze to sit flush against its neighbor, bedded in crushed shale and lime grit that had set hard over decades of freeze and thaw.
Kezra counted the risers unconsciously with her boots. A land-mapper’s habit she could no more discard than her breath. One, two, three, four. The air grew perceptibly thinner as they climbed toward the western bench. They smelled of drying yarrow, wet earth, and the faint, pine-scented bite of dwarf larch needles…
