Chapter 32: The Dose

The lantern on the cart pole had a crack through its rim glass, and his left hand knew it before his eyes did. Kael sat on the tailboard with his back to the grain sacks and his boots over the road. The hand lay in his lap in its linen. It could not tell him whether the tin was warm. It could tell him that the ward behind the glass was split and still holding a thread of charge, an arm's length from his knee, and that the thread leaned toward him. Nothing in him said yes to it. The palm said yes anyway. He took the lantern off its hook by the bail with the crook of two fingers, not touching the glass, and pushed it down between two sacks. The dark would do for a lid. Then he sat back and put his shoulders against the grain and…