Tessa Dene kept her right hand in her apron pocket, her thumb resting on the rivet-pinned ashwood handle of her salvage bread knife, while the wind off the pass combed through the dead weeds along the gatehouse wall.
She had lived in Mere all sixteen years of her life, and she knew how people in Tanner’s Lane and Mill Row looked when a bailiff or a mine clerk read a paper at them. Usually their faces went flat as ironed linen. You did not give a clerk expression; if you looked too angry, he wrote down disorderly, and if you looked too relieved, he checked the math to see what he had missed taking.
Yet nobody on the frost-rimmed flagstones was wearing their bailiff face now.
When Sergeant Berr paused over entry two hundred and nineteen—the nameless twelve-year-old weaver’s apprentice in the blue wool scarf whom he had shoved feet-first into the west culvert before the burning roof beams came down—old Mira Kettle did not reach out to stop her grand-niece. She simply stepped half a pace to her left, clearing the flagstone between the third row and the threshold arch.
Young Nera stepped forward.
She was nineteen, three winters older than Tessa, with red-chapped knuckles from the fulling vats and a heavy winter shawl pinned at her throat with a bone bodkin. Against her ribs she held a square cedar keepsake box with dove-tailed corners, the sort of box valley brides used to keep their mothers’ horn combs and…
