Ten minutes after the limestone cleanout slab dropped into its rebate beneath the master kiln floor, Maud Venn, Master Corin. Tessa emerged from the narrow, fern-choked mouth of the old quarry cut. The cool autumn wind was a blessing against their soot-streaked faces, washing away the choking heat of the firing bay.
They crouched low in the dense hazel and juniper thickets that lined the rim of the disused quarry, three hundred paces east of the village outer edge. Below them, through the screening branches of wild elderberry, the slate roofs and whitewashed gables of Kilnstep lay clustered in the morning light like discarded flagons. At the front entrance of the kiln house, four Cairn Host spearmen still stood rigidly at attention, their weapons resting against their shoulders. They were blissfully unaware that their prize had vanished into the earth.
A soft bird call—the double whistle of an upland curlew—sounded from the hawthorn hedge ten paces to their left. Old Marn, a sixty-two-year-old brick-stacker who had worked the drying sheds since boyhood, parted the branches and beckoned them forward, his weathered face creased with urgent concern.
‘Maud,’ the old man whispered, his breath wheezing slightly. ‘The families are already two miles up the sunken lane. Mistress Elspeth and the children have reached the timberline above High Meadow. But Vorn’s mounted pickets are still patrolling the main valley freight road. If we try to cross the open pasture now, their outriders will spot our cloaks against the limestone.’
