The back kitchen chimney was built of rough river dark rock, its wide stone breast blackened by fifty years of peat and coal smoke. A low, glowing bed of dark red turf embers hissed softly in the hearth grate, streaming a dry, piercing warmth that smelled of moss, dry earth, and healing herbs.
Pella Rook sat on a low pine bench wedged into the chimney corner, her stockinged feet resting on a flat riverstone that Merrow had heated in the ashes. Her heavy cart driver boots stood upside down near the hearth door post. It steamed gently as the river moisture was baked from the thick leather.
Beside her, Eren Tal sat with his elbows on his knees, his broad hands clasped between his thighs. He stared into the red heart of the embers. The silence between them was not the tense, dramatic quiet of summoners awaiting a duel. It was the heavy, bone-deep silence of two working people who had grown up in the same flooded alleys, who had buried their elders in the same muddy churchyard, and who were now facing the total ruin of everything they had ever touched.
“My grandfather used to sit right on that bench,” Eren said softly, his voice barely louder than the crumbling of the peat ash. “Back in the winter of the great freeze, when the ice jam took the old timber bridge. He sat there with two broken ribs and three cracked fingers, drinking hot vinegar and animal fat because…
