Dawn on the second day of Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s four-day deadline arrived wrapped in wet river fog that smelled of sawdust and coal smoke.
Noll Vey had not slept, partly because stones do not sleep and partly because every time he let his awareness drift down into the deep shale beneath the Grand Hall, he could now feel the faint, hollow scar of the Number Four sump tunnel ninety fathoms below his roots. Knowing that Vane’s crews had been down there with brass cases and red die-stamps two full winters before Noll ever set foot in Mere was like discovering that the stage trapdoor you had fallen through by accident had been greased, hinged, and numbered with your boot size before you even bought your train ticket.
“Stop grinding the pantry flagstones, Noll,” Tessa Dene said as she came through the hall carrying a bucket of hot wood-ash lye to scrub the porch steps. She had slept four hours on a pallet beside her father’s cot in the East Room, and now that Edren was sitting up drinking Hobb’s barley gruel without rattling his ribs, her usual brisk, no-nonsense scowl was back in full working order. “You’re making the flour barrels hum, and Hobb says it curdles the yeast.”
