At the River Ward tollhouse wharf, three hundred paces below the great stone weir, the water of the Rookvale canal was flowing clear, green, and cold from the alpine snowfields of the Guard range.
Nessa Tern stood on the scrubbed granite coping of the lock-gate pier, her hands resting against the smooth, sun-warmed timber of the balance-beam. Around her waist she wore a wide leather apron fitted with pockets for her carpenter’s pencils, chalk stones, and the heavy brass sounding line she used to verify the canal depths at every morning change. The air was fresh and damp, filled with the rushing roar of the overflow water gate and the clean, stone scent of wet slate and river moss.
On the zinc-topped toll desk behind her lay the morning canal ledger.
Where five pages of emergency seizure receipts and curfew permits had once filled every day’s traffic book, the pages were now clean and ruled for ordinary civilian trade. Timber rafts from the upper pines, crates of heat-softened window glass from the Salt kilns, fifty-ton barge-loads of cut limestone, and flat-bottomed skiffs carrying apples and spelt flour to the southern villages.
Below her, a sixty-foot freight barge built of heavy mountain fir was gliding slowly through the opened lock-chamber.
