Walking back down the winding limestone steps from the northeastern sorting yard on the afternoon of Day 96, Kezra Venn let her team move ahead. Meanwhile, she slowed her pace along the middle working terraces. The sun had crested its arc and was sliding down toward the western crags. It cast a warm, golden glaze across the sixty nested rings of dry-stone walling that held the life of Alderfast against the mountain.
Her field coat felt comfortable across her shoulders, her brass-tipped sounding rod clicking lightly against the slate risers with every step. Her live ledger held thirty-one completed circuits, two approved fallback addresses, and six open slots. For the first time since crossing the high snow passes, she had an afternoon free of immediate survey counts, free to simply watch how the people of this valley lived.
What she saw was not a community waiting passively for deliverance. But a fine, detailed, stubborn web of mutual labor that had sustained one hundred and twenty-six human beings through eighteen months of military encirclement.
In an open-fronted tool shed on the third terrace, sheltered from the dropping wind by a thick stack of split cedar logs, sat Vennor. The sixty-year-old former drift timberman, whose thigh rings had burst. Just then, he held the iron bar off Davren’s chest, sat on a broad bench with his ulcerated legs propped horizontally on a straw-filled stool. His swollen calves were cleanly wrapped in fresh linen, his crutches leaning against the wall behind him.
