At dusk on Day 144, the winter twilight settled over the rugged southern slopes below Stonewake Citadel. That turned the limestone cliffs to deep charcoal.
Kezra Venn and Yseld Arken walked twenty paces south of the southern Horizon boundary line, out to a sheltered mountain pasture where a combined crew of basin wagon drivers and refusing Host wagon drivers was completing the livestock holding ground. The class safeguard strictly forbids the unconsented or untagged movement of any living animal larger than a human hand. Because of that, and because Kezra refused to risk the lives of horses, mules, and dogs by treating them as tagged military passengers, every beast inside the castle had to be safely penned outside the square before the dawn count began.
To organize the enclosure, Kezra relied upon the herding discipline she had learned from Joric Thane at the Saltglass quarry during the alpine trek on Day 31.
Joric had always taught her that beasts see spatial shifted weight far more acutely than humans. An animal’s inner ear registers the deep low, deep ring of shifting bedrock minutes before the stone moves. Ruminants—horses, oxen, sheep, and goats—feel the magnetic shear running through native fault lines. If beasts are penned on ground that is about to exchange, their hooves pick up the ground tremor. That triggered uncontrollable herd panic that can break timber fences and cause animals to stampede over cliff edges. But if they’re moved twenty paces onto native bedrock outside the boundary line, their instincts…
