Rejoining Davren and Fellis in the sheltered hollow of the dead ground ditch took only five minutes of careful backtracking down the scree. They were safely back behind the dry-stone retaining wall. Then, Fellis spread his working sketch across a flat slab of limestone. They used his good right hand to smooth the edges while Davren held the lower corners down with his walking stick.
The young ropewright’s face was flushed with the satisfaction of a craftsman whose measurements had proven true. Despite the splint on his left forearm. It had bound his wrist since the iron staple failed on the cliffs of Hushwood on the sixty-eighth day, Fellis had adapted to his one-handed work with remarkable dexterity. His fingers held the chalk with easy control, shading the stone contours with fine, even strokes.
“Look here, Kezra,” Fellis said. He tapped the corner of the rubble enclosure with a piece of sharpened red chalk. “While you were up on the outcrop, Davren and I crawled along the bottom of the under-road drain until we were fifty paces from the service gate where the wagon drivers haul out the night-soil barrels. The ground behind that rubble wall isn’t patrolled like the main outer gatehouse. It’s an open lane between the castle privy chutes and the mountain cliff, barely wide enough for two mules to pass abreast.”
