Ossa Flint sat on the low wooden stool beside the pine worktable with her bandaged right wrist resting across her knee and her good eye fixed on the black iron Dutch oven lid.
She did not look like a master artificer of the Royal Survey now. With her iron-grey hair matted with dried culvert silt and the star-cracked lens glinting dully over her scarred left socket, she looked like what she was: a tired woman of fifty-eight whose life’s work had just spoken back to her in the voice of a coughing seventeen-year-old boy.
“The forms were signed,” Ossa said. Her voice was flat and hollow, stripped of the sharp classroom arrogance she had carried into the fort an hour earlier. “Every sheet in the lower-drift folder came up to my bench with a witnessed signature or a witnessed black-ink thumbprint in the lower right box, countersigned by a sworn clerk of the March Ledger.”
“A thumbprint,” Tessa Dene said, setting the blacksmith’s tongs down on the pine boards with a slow, deliberate clank that made Cale wince. “You saw twelve dirty thumbprints on a piece of paper from Orin Vane’s cellar, and you called them volunteers.”
“I am an artificer of stone and seal-circuitry, not a magistrate’s bailiff!” Ossa flared, her thin shoulders stiffening for half a breath before the memory of the tinny chant in the ore flake cut the heat out of her throat. She looked down at her muddy skirt. “When the Crown commissioned the first…
