The vote was on Cale’s parchment, twenty neat ink entries bound under the Rule of Consideration, and Noll Vey felt a sudden, treacherous looseness in his chest.
It was the specific kind of relief he remembered from the old days in the river towns—the dangerous lightness that came after a tense room finally agreed to buy tickets to an impossible show. For ten minutes, while the miners gathered their coats and Fen went back down the cellar stair to his wash-basins, Noll let himself mistake shared consent for safety. If nineteen people had raised their hands, if the Keeper of Works had laid down conditions and the old miners had agreed for the sake of the children, then surely the weight of the coming dawn was no longer his solitary burden.
“Don’t do that, Noll,” Tessa said, not looking up from the table.
She was using the point of her bread knife to scrape a patch of dried mutton tallow off the pine planks. Her sleeve was rolled to the elbow, showing the pale line of an old lime-burn across her forearm.
“Do what?” Noll asked through the hearth flue.
“You’re breathing like a man who just convinced a magistrate to drop a summons,” Tessa said. Her knife made a rhythmic, shaving sound against the grain. “A vote doesn’t make a bad plan good. It only means nineteen people have decided they would rather drown together than be shot on the bank. If you start thinking this hall gave you…
