Shafts of dusty afternoon sunlight slanted through the high louver boards of Eren Tal’s wheelwright timber shed, lighting up piles of curled cedar and ash shavings along the floor. The shed smelled richly of boiled linseed oil, green heartwood, warm beeswax cake. The clean metal bite of freshly whetted carbon steel. Across the center of the room stood Bench Two. A twelve-foot oak frame stand scrubbed free of axle grease and covered with a clean sheet of raw, unwhitened linen.
Master Tailor Dima Fen stood beside the oak frame stand with a heavy iron tailor’s goose and a serrated leather knife. His forearms were corded with wiry muscle from thirty years of stretching heavy reed-cloth and pressing double-woven canvas. At forty-six, with gray threading his neatly trimmed beard and four brass thimbles racked on his waistcoat chain, he was the finest heavy-textile cutter within three miles of the Three Rivers.
Local Lathmere canvas was hand-loomed and irregular. He needed Dima to identify the straight grain before laying Jo’s cardboard templates. Beside his elbow sat the corrugated cardboard mockup pieces Jo Saye had passed across the Courtesy Bridge from Harrowby, together with a leather tray holding his custom-hammered brass spreading rings and skived oxhide washers.
