Warm mid-morning sun spilled over the stone wall of the wheelwright’s yard. That turned the scattered white heavy clay dust on the gravel into a pale frost that smelled of kiln clay and crushed pine shavings. Pella Rook sat down hard on a squared balk of cured oak beside the splintered workbench. That let her shoulders drop as the cold dread she had carried since Corvin’s audit query yesterday afternoon finally drained out of her knees.
Her palms were damp around the brass case of her stopwatch. Her breath came out in a long, shaky laugh as Sister Merrow emerged from the back kitchen doorway carrying a wooden tray loaded with four clay pot mugs of steaming chicory and thick wedges of buttered soda bread. Beside the bench, Foreman Eren Tal leaned his eight-pound sledgehammer against the timber stack and began sweeping the broken baked-clay shards into an iron ash bucket with a stiff bass broom.
Pella laid her stopwatch beside Corvin’s brass pocket watch on the oak balk, comparing the split-hand positions with her wooden ruler. Between the two independent instruments, the variance at contract expiration was less than two hundredths of a second, and the spatial manifestation of the return oval had occurred thirty-eight feet six inches from the demolished arch with zero ringing rebound.
