With Hobb’s hot bean stew inside her ribs and a clean linen bandage pinned snug around her rope-burned right wrist, Ossa Flint recovered the dry, unsparing precision of a woman who had spent forty years measuring stone stress to the hundredth of an inch.
She stood before the western wall of the Grand Hall, holding Prit’s stub of grey audit chalk in her left hand. Because her shattered left lens gave her only a milky blur of light on that side, she kept her chin angled sharply to the left so her single bloodshot grey eye could sight along the mortar lines where Prit had bracketed the seven sleeping vermin debts.
“A Mark Four claim-collar,” Ossa began, drawing a clean triangle on the fieldstone directly below Noll Vey’s blue niche, “is not a single rope. A single rope can be cut by any fool with a cold chisel. When Lord Auditor Vane commissioned the valley circuit this autumn, he required a triangular load-frame anchored at three separate points in the bedrock so that no local accident—and no disobedient artificer—could uncouple the core at one stroke.”
At the pine bench behind her, Cale dipped his goose quill to copy her diagram into the working margin of the Book of Witness, while Sella Rusk and Tessa Dene stood side by side near the hearth, watching every chalk line go onto the stone.
