When the final echo of the three-minute silence died away into the dry rustle of the mountain breeze, sixteen-year-old Heth Ash stepped forward from the line of delegates to the low cedar table beside Doma Reel’s bier.
She moved with the quiet, steady composure that had settled into her frame during the past two weeks. Her dark hair was neatly pinned beneath a clean white cotton kerchief. Her gray woolen dress was patched at the elbows but freshly washed with well-water. And though her breath still carried the faint, dry wheeze of the coal smoke that had scarred her bronchi, she held her chin high. She looked out over the five thousand people filling Tram Square without a trace of pause.
Resting on the cedar table before her sat seven box-shaped boxes of smooth, seasoned white pine, crafted by the railway carpenters and branded on the lids with the newly approved heraldic emblems of the seven liberated wards: the Cog of Tram, the Shovel of Quarry, the Sheaf of Orchard, the Weir of River, the Crucible of Salt, the Arch of Gate, and the Prism of Star tower.
Inside each box, tied with raw, unwhitened linen cord, lay a thirty-page hand-copied manuscript.
