Six days before Kezra Venn laid the working promise upon the council table in Alderfast, the autumn sun rose pale and copper-rimmed over the low limestone bluffs of Kilnstep. In the open yard of the master pottery works, the early morning air was thick with the rich, earthy smell of washed river slip, damp turf. The clean, pungent tang of seasoned oak split for the firing bays.
Maud Venn stood on the worn limestone threshold of her workshop, a wooden shaping rib held lightly in her apron pocket and a mug of bitter chicory tea steaming in her hand. Her hair, greying at the temples and pulled back in a tight linen scarf, showed the fine white dusting of dried kaolin that marked forty years of labor at the wheels. At fifty-eight years of age, her shoulders were thick with the corded muscle of a woman who had wedged forty tons of clay with her bare forearms and raised two children who knew how to look the world straight in the eye.
Behind her inside the dim, cool workshop, three heavy kick-wheels stood motionless in their pits, their oak flywheels smoothed by decades of wet soles. On the long drying shelves lining the stone wall rested row upon row of unglazed clay pot crocks, wide bread bowls, and narrow oil pitchers, each marked on its base with the small split-chevron stamp that had identified Venn pottery in the highland markets for two ages. She looked at those pots not with…
