The morning sun of Day 159 climbed above the eastern lime ridges. It burned away the low white mist that stayed in the hollows of the pasture country.
A gentle breeze blew from the northwest, carrying the rich, familiar fragrance of Kilnstep. The sharp, pine-scented smoke of seasoned alder firewood, the damp stone tang of wet river clay settling in the wash troughs. The faint, sweet scent of dried chamomile hanging from the drying shed roof edges.
Kezra Venn walked at the head of the small party. They turned off the county turnpike onto the lower quarry lane.
The quarry lane was a sunken, gravel-surfaced cart track cut six feet into the limestone bedrock. It was bordered on both sides by high hazel hedges and overgrown blackberry briars. For two hundred years, wagon drivers had hauled raw building blocks and wheelbarrows of grey clay along this narrow cut, wearing deep, parallel grooves into the living stone that even the heaviest winter rains couldn’t wash away. As children, Kezra and Davren had spent entire summer afternoons running barefoot along these stone ruts, hunting for stone-hard crinoid stems in the exposed cliff faces and hiding in the mossy drainage alcoves whenever their mother called them in to wedge pottery clay.
