The smell of scorched wine vinegar hung over the pine table long after the dust of Hobb’s barley flour settled onto the floor stones.
Noll kept his gaze fixed on the third sheet of cream rag paper through the mortar seams of the western wall. He did not need fingers to feel the paper; every grain of the linen fiber seemed pressed directly against his blue core, registered in the cool, unforgiving weight of stone. Paragraph three remained intact, penned in the narrow, pinched hand of a senior surveyor:
Subject: NOLL VEY, age 51, itinerant stage conjurer, native of Low Vale. Known associates: few, transient. Credit standing: insolvent. Subject demonstrates documented facility with rapid verbal fabrication, stage misdirection, and crowd engagement under duress.
Beneath that, the date sat stamped in red wax that had hardened into brittle flakes forty-four days before Varn ever stepped into the taproom at the Black Dog:
Sixteenth of Harvest-Month.
Forty-four days. Six weeks.
Noll felt a terrible, icy stillness drop through his center, colder than winter groundwater leaking into an abandoned cellar.
All these months—since the freezing midnight when he had opened his eyes to discover he was no longer a man with aching knees and a threadbare velvet coat, but a lump of blue mineral wedged into a ruined hill fort’s foundation—he had carried a quiet, stubborn story inside his thoughts. It had been an ugly story, but it was his own. He had told himself that he was dead because he had been…
