Supper was thirty-year-old garrison beans boiled in salt water with two dried bay leaves and a thumb-sized scrap of rancid bacon rind.
Nobody complained about the food. When a winter blizzard was screaming over the northern ridge and Lord Auditor Vane’s pickets were holding the valley road with loaded crossbows, a hot bowl of salty mush was the difference between holding a wall and digging graves in frozen turf. But as the wooden bowls were scraped clean and the tallow candles began to gut in their iron saucers, the chill in the great hall settled like wet sand into every boot.
Noll Vey gathered his thinned consciousness in the hearth flue, watching the nine residents gather around the scarred trestle table.
On the center of the scrubbed pine boards sat a small rectangular cedar box with brass hinges and a sliding bone latch. Hesta Quill’s players had left it behind when they packed their stage cart for the southern road; in the old days, Noll had used it to make a live toad turn into a silver thimble for three copper pennies a look. Beside the box lay a smooth, egg-shaped river cobble of grey granite, scrubbed clean of river silt and still damp from Hobb’s scullery bucket.
