The linen curtain separating the sick room nook from the kitchen pantry smelled of steeped willow bark, antiseptic wash. The sour, feverish sweat of a wounded man whose body was fighting off infection.
Ivara Quill pushed the curtain aside with the back of her wrist. She stepped quietly onto the scrubbed pine floorboards. In her single right hand, she carried her folding zinc slate, the graphite pencil clipped to the corner with a brass wire spring.
Bram Ash was sitting propped up against three sacks of dried split peas. His right arm bound was tight to his chest with strips of clean, boiled sheeting. The skin of his face was gray, lined with deep creases of tiredness, his temples glistening with the slick sheen of traumatic fever. But when his dark eyes looked up and met Ivara’s gaze, they were clear, cold, and razor-sharp. The eyes of a senior town court guard who had survived fifteen years of Survey Office politics.
Beside his pallet sat Heth, his sixteen-year-old daughter. The girl was dipping a clean linen rag into a clay pot bowl of cool well water, gently wiping the dried sweat and coal soot from her father’s forehead, her own breath whistling with the dry, familiar rattle of her damaged lungs.
