Adra Pike didn’t call the households by family pride or military rank. She laid a thick slab of dark roofing slate across two carpenter’s sawhorses in the center of the assembly stones, dipped a lump of soft white lime-chalk into a wooden water cup. Then she called the basin register by terrace level, starting with the lower drainage flats near the abandoned silver tailings.
Beside her, Kezra Venn sat on a low three-legged stool with a clean ledger folio balanced across her woolen knees. She didn’t draw a single sweeping square across the valley map to enclose all one hundred and twenty-six inhabitants as a collective unit of cargo. Instead, Kezra divided her pages into five disciplined columns: household name, total persons, mobility constraints, livestock head, and essential trade tools.
“Household One,” Adra called out, her voice cutting through the dry alpine breeze that rattled the dry stalks of winter cabbage. “Branoc the smith, three adults, two young boys, four goats. What’s your mind, Branoc?”
A broad-shouldered man with forge-burned forearms and a copper ring in his ear stepped out from the cluster of miners. His wife stood half a pace behind him, holding a small boy by each hand. Both children had the pinched nostrils, pale cheeks, and dry, rasping cough of chronic basin pleurisy.
