The tallow-red wax came back up the valley road before the baker’s first batch of morning loaves had risen.
Noll Vey felt the paste-brushes slapping against the town’s timber walls at dawn. All along the lower lane, wherever a householder had left one of the fort’s clay-and-brass tokens sitting near an outer windowsill or a porch step, the sound carried up the limestone ribs of the hill: the wet slap-scrape of boiled flour-paste, the rustle of stiff rag paper, and the measured, booted tread of four-man military patrols marching behind a Survey House crier.
By the time Cale and Rella the apothecary hurried up the muddy ditch path into the Bastion gatehouse, both of them were out of breath, and Rella had a wet, red-bordered broadsheet crumpled in her herb-stained fist.
“He didn’t even wait for the Greyford riders to change horses,” Cale panted, his wool muffler crooked around his chin as he flattened the damp broadsheet across Hobb’s upturned flour barrel inside the arch. “Vane had the Quarantine forms printed and sitting in the lower vault before Bardon ever walked out to the well yesterday! Yesterday’s Exposure Roll was just a prod to make Reeve Holt cite the parish charter—because there’s only one peacetime writ in the realm that suspends the Seven Dukes’ Charter without an assize judge!”
