The mid-afternoon sun hung low and cold above the western crenellations of Stonewake. It cast long, sharp shadows across the lower service ward. While Master Garrow’s masons were still high on the northern cliff face with safety ropes and shovels. He cleared the rubble slide from the ancient bedrock risers, Kezra stood in the center of the service court, her eyes surveying the open ground with calculating care.
She needed honest circuits.
To attain the rank of Horizon Mapmaker—the rank needed to command a 1,024-pace parcel and execute a whole-castle exchange—she had to gather forty approved, lawful circuits in her bonded ledger. She had entered Stonewake on Day 97 with thirty-one circuits recorded. The massive outer castle boundary couldn’t be approved until every deep stratum and cellar was surveyed, but right here in the service ward lay an opportunity to advance her count without waiting for the miners to clear the deep shaft.
Twelve paces clear of the third-company barracks, standing entirely isolated in the gravel yard, was the guard post’s detached stone washhouse.
It was a stout, box-shaped building fourteen paces long by twelve paces wide, built of grey hard speckled granite rubble with dressed quoins and a low-pitched roof of thick mountain slate. Inside, two massive copper cooking pots sat mounted over stone-lined fire pits. There, the camp laundresses boiled soldier-linens in bubbling lye-water.
