Pell brought the midday meal up the ridge in a wagon that had been built for barrels and had never once carried anything so precious as bread, and she did it with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a face that dared anybody to say the wagon was too slow.
Nobody said it. The lodgers on the ridge had seen Pell’s wagon come up from the Kitchen every day that week, and they had learned in that time what the wagon meant. It meant bread, which was the Kitchen’s own, baked at the Lowgate oven under Osk’s eye and carried up in cloths. It meant a pot of barley, boiled with salt and a little dried marsh-onion, which Pell swore would put iron back into any Hand who ate it, and which Sella said would put nothing back at all except a taste for barley. And it meant a small wooden box with a brass hasp, which sat on the wagon’s seat beside Pell’s knee and which she had been told, very firmly, by the Chamber’s Treasurer, not to open.
She had not opened it. She had looked at it a great deal.
“The salt,” she told Harrow, when he came down the trench to meet the wagon with his count-cord over his shoulder, “is the Hold’s. It is in the box. You may not have any of it until the Chamber has counted it.”
