Tessa Dene kept her right hand shoved deep inside her apron pocket, her thumb hooked hard around the forged iron tang of her tax-exempt bread knife.
The iron was cold and familiar against her palm. She had helped hammer that blade out of scrap wagon-tire iron in the courtyard three weeks ago, before Lord Auditor Orin Vane ever sat down at Hobb’s table, and she had learned since then that holding onto a piece of solid metal was the only way to keep her voice from shaking when grown men started talking about odds.
Across the scrubbed limestone slab in the center of the East Room, Fen was laying out his instruments on a cloth boiled twice in lye and willow-bark water. They were terrible, ordinary things: a narrow-bladed scalpel honed until its edge looked like a wet hair, two curved bone needles threaded with boiled horsehair and raw silk, a pair of long iron forceps with fine cross-hatched jaws, and six linen sponges folded into neat squares.
“Six out of ten isn’t good enough,” Tessa said, her boots planted wide between the instrument tray and the bench where her father sat with his grey blanket draped over his bare shoulders. “That means four times out of ten you cut him open and he doesn’t get up. Why can’t we pack his ribs with bitter-root poultice for a week first, build his strength up with Hobb’s meat broth, and send Sella down the southern road for Master Harlan from the…
