Dawn came up over the sheep-pen ditch the color of dirty pewter, and the grey audit chalk on the Grand Hall wall still smelled of wet cellar dust.
Noll Vey kept his attention spread thin across the western masonry, watching the seven bracketed warnings Prit had drawn before sunrise. After the blind rubble hound Bristle had torn its way out of an old first-night boast to a red fox, Prit had refused to sleep or fold his coat until every last crumb of Noll’s earliest fevered mutterings sat exposed in the open. There they were, chalked across the fieldstone like a tavern tab run up by a sleepwalker: a cellar stair promised to a grain beetle, a wheel of ceiling cheese whispered to a starving mouse, a noon-warm lantern boasted to a frost-bitten moth, a sweet rain pool sworn to a drain toad, a chime-stone for a hearth cricket, a self-sweeping broom for a rafter spider, and draft-sealing mortar for a wall snail.
In Noll’s traveling days, waking up to learn you had promised seven separate miracles to local vermin would have been the signal to grease the wagon axles and cross the county line before breakfast. Being cemented into five hundred tons of border limestone complicated the exit strategy.
