The Old Turnpike at Blackwood Ridge was an isolated stretch of corduroy road running through dense stands of hemlock and black birch, twenty leagues north of Bellwether. Here, the ground rose sharply toward the limestone foothills of the Karst Range. The autumn wind blew in cold, ragged gusts that carried the smell of wet pine needles and rotting leaves.
Team Nineteen—Porter Davin and Clerk Selen—were pushing their two-wheeled cart through a deep mud wallow where an under-road drain had washed out. Davin, a stocky hauler of thirty with the thick shoulders of an ox-wagon driver, was knee-deep in gray clay, his boots making loud, sucking gasps as he strained against the wooden spokes. Behind the cart, Selen, a nineteen-year-old girl with sharp black eyes and a patched wool cloak, was levering a hemlock pole beneath the rear axle to keep the iron-bound registry chests from tilting into the ditch.
“Heave on the pole, Selen!” Davin grunted, his breath streaming like horse steam in the freezing air. “If this wheel slips the stone ledge, the grease-box will fill with silt. We’ll be carrying these boxes on our pack-frames all the way to Oakhaven.”
Before Selen could reply, the sharp crack of a broken branch echoed from the hemlock thicket above the road cut. Two horses broke through the underbrush, their shod hooves throwing wet clay as they skidded down the embankment, blocking the turnpike thirty paces ahead. A third horseman appeared from the rear, cutting off the retreat toward the lower…
