Nine living townsfolk stood in a half-circle on the cold flagstones beneath the main arch, their breath steaming in the thin morning sun while ten paces outside the boundary stones the Survey House clerk’s quill scratched across his parchment roll.
Noll Vey kept himself completely still inside the gatehouse masonry. He did not warm the flags under the visitors’ boots, though he wanted to; any unasked dungeon touch might feel like a hand on their sleeves, and Sella Rusk had promised them plain air and plain stone. Instead, Noll listened with every damp mortar joint around the threshold as Cale—who had slipped up the back goat-path before daybreak with his municipal spelling book tucked inside his vest—stepped quietly beside Prit’s upturned flour tub to verify the faded town family names against the old parish rolls.
Sergeant Berr looked around the small semicircle of faces: Jori and Corin with their axes grounded at their heels, Tomas holding his wool cap against his chest, Rella clutching her apothecary basket, the three mill women with their shawls pinned tight, and weaver Mira standing shoulder to shoulder with her young great-niece Nera.
Beneath Fen’s neat white linen bandage, the sergeant’s left hand was now little more than a pale chalk outline from wrist to knuckle, as though a child had sketched five fingers on the dark iron of his shield and rubbed half the lines away with a wet thumb.
