The communal seed store on the middle terrace of Alderfast was built from heavy dry-stone granite blocks, cut into the hillside and roofed with thick slate slabs covered in turf to keep winter frost from piercing the grain bins. It was one of the two Plot-scale addresses Kezra still kept as live sites in her notebook (Circuit 29), its sixteen-pace-square outer edge encompassing the storehouse, the drying terrace. The stone steps that led up to the communal well. The air inside smelled of dry cedar shingle, stone dust, dried peppermint. The faint, dusty sweetness of stored grain.
Adra Pike sat at a heavy frame stand table near the hanging iron scale, the community storehouse ledger spread open before her. The book was bound in greasy cowhide, its coarse rag pages filled with thirty years of crop yields, frost dates, and seed weights recorded in the cramped, careful script of three successive grower elders. Beside her stood Davren. His ash stick leaned against the table leg. Paxa Sel, who had opened her medical ration register to compare nutritional minimums against the storehouse bins.
The seed store’s stone walls were four feet thick at the foundation. It was built with double-faced granite cut stone filled with crushed lime rubble to prevent mountain rats from burrowing into the bins. Around the outer edge of the room, high off the damp stone floor, thirty-six wooden bins were framed from seasoned larch, each marked with a cut cleanly numeral and the personal crop-mark of the…
