By early afternoon on Day 95, the mountain sun had begun its gradual descent toward the serrated limestone needles of the western rim, throwing sharp slanted shadows across the upper terraces of Alderfast. The wind had shifted into the northwest. It carried the dry, crisp chill of high scree and the aromatic scent of crushed mountain thyme and sun-warmed juniper scrub.
Kezra Venn climbed the sixty stone risers from the seed store toward the upper western bench, with Fellis Dain, Yseld Arken, Voss, and two basin joiners carrying spare sighting rods. Along the terrace walls, three growers were pulling the late purple-top turnips from the friable soil, shaking the dark loam from the root hairs and tossing the roots into split-willow baskets. The air smelled of sweet turnip flesh and bruised earth. Frost, Adra had remarked earlier, always drove the sugar down into the roots before the ground froze hard.
Her canvas boots were caked with drying grey silt, but Kezra’s stride was light and steady. The morning’s successful sign-off had settled her nerves into the disciplined, rhythmic focus that had always governed her craft since her earliest days in Kilnstep.
The second structure Adra Pike had selected sat on an exposed limestone shelf eighty paces above the highest turnip beds. It was an isolated stone tool shelter, eight paces long by six paces wide. It was built from dry-laid limestone field blocks and roofed with rough split-larch shakes held down by heavy river stones.
