At eleven o’clock that morning, the sound of hurried boots on the roadside gravel announced a visitor to the Highfield posthouse.
Len Vey sat at his sorting table beside the open eastern casement, dipping his boxwood spoon into a fresh clay pot bowl of winter leek and barley broth.
His left arm rested comfortably along the polished pine boards, the stiff boiled-leather brace unlaced at the wrist. That let the full, uncurtained morning sun bathe the four-inch razor-sharp seam on his forearm bone. The white scar tissue had absorbed the heat. That turned a healthy, ruddy pink that showed neither swelling nor pain. The walnut-sized callus of knitted bone was cool, hard, and quiet, resting in peaceful balance with the inner bone-web.
Through the open window, the mountain air moved in long, fragrant drafts. It lifted the white linen curtains in slow, lazy billows that brushed against the cedar window frame.
A boy of fourteen stepped up to the outside doorstep.
He was an apprentice blacksmith from the Highfield village forge shop—young Robin Kars, the nephew of Master Kars—dressed in a coarse grey linen work-smock covered by a stiff apron of heavy cowhide, stained with charcoal dust, iron filings, and yellow flux grease. In his soot-blackened hands he clutched a crumpled woolen cap, his knuckles white with tension, his breathing coming in short, nervous gasps as if he had run all the way from the three-mile turn.
