The crumb on the table smelled of dry threshing floors, river silt, and Hobb’s pickling kettle. Bell swallowed the crust, wiping pale flour dust from her freckled cheek. The warmth in the walls hummed like a kettle over peat embers, steady and thin, lacking the violent rush that usually accompanied an ungrounded con.
Down the long gallery, the Room of Mirrors answered with a faint blue pulse, soft as lantern light filtered through horn.
“It tastes like summer bedding,” Bell remarked, turning the remainder of the straw loaf over in her calloused fingers. “The third cut from the lower meadow, where the wild clover dries out bitter. But it stays in the belly. My teeth did not crack, and my ribs feel full enough to haul two more barrows of rubble before dusk.”
“That is because the grain dust was in the cellar bin, and the straw was gathered from the stables two days ago,” Noll spoke through the chimney seam, pitching his voice like an innkeeper explaining small beer. “The ledger did not reach across the county to snatch flour from a miller. It simply took what was scattered and called it baked.”
“And she knew what she was choosing,” Tessa Dene said from the bench across from the hearth, scraping dry lime from her salvage bread knife. “She knew there was a river cobble under one lid and a supper roll under the other. No one whispered that the stone was silver. No one told her she would…
