The small, vaulted pantry behind the central kitchen ovens smelled of toasted caraway seeds, boiled salt lard, and the warm, brown crust of forty loaves of hard-tack bread cooling on pine racks.
Len Vey sat on a coarse burlap sack filled with fifty pounds of gray sea salt, his back resting against the whitewashed brick of the chimney pier. His right hand was curled loosely around the joint of his ash sounding pole. At the same time, his left arm lay motionless in its clean linen sling, resting against his ribs like a braced wing.
Doma Reel stood at the bread bench four feet away, her broad, muscular forearms white with flour dust to the elbows. Her heavy hands moved with the easy, unrushed rhythm of a baker who had divided four hundred batches of dough by touch. Slicing a two-pound loaf with a serrated steel knife. It wrapped the steaming bread in a sheet of sulfur-bleached greaseproof paper. Then it folded the corners with two sharp, three-sided tucks secured with rough hemp twine.
“How is Bram?” Len asked, breaking the quiet rhythm of the knife.
“The fever has settled into his collarbone,” Doma answered without looking up from her twine. “His shoulder is hot as a fire door. His teeth were chattering like dice in a leather cup an hour ago. But the wound is clean. Heth is sitting beside his pallet, washing his brow with cold willow-bark water and feeding him broth with a bone spoon. The bleeding…
