Cale came through the main gate arch looking as though he had been chased up the switchback by a pack of bailiffs with hot tongs.
His wool waistcoat was buttoned one hole crooked, his spectacles were fogged with his own breath, and his knuckles were white around the neck of the coarse hemp flour sack he had dragged out of Hobb’s barrow the instant Cale crossed the boundary stones. Behind him, Sella Rusk swung the timber bar into its iron bracket while Tessa Dene dropped her scrubbing brush into her bucket and hurried into the Grand Hall after them.
“Table,” Cale wheezed, stumbling across the warm flagstones toward Hobb’s scrubbed pine worktable beside the hearth. “Clear the cabbage board—don’t let the wet wood touch the oilcloth—”
Tessa swept a wooden trencher and two paring knives out of the way. Cale heaved the hundred-pound flour sack onto the pine planks with a dull whump that sent a white cloud of barley meal blooming up over his dark clerk’s sleeves. Without waiting to untie Hobb’s hemp twine, he drew his bone-handled penknife, slit the binding cord, and plunged both hands into the warm meal.
Noll watched from the western wall seam, every facet of his blue core focused on the table. Even across twelve feet of air, Noll could smell the sharp, wrong odor rising from the split sack—not sweet ground grain, but scorched wine vinegar and overheated brass, the exact tang that had risen from Edren’s ore shard when Prit dropped…
