Tessa Dene kept both hands wrapped around the tin cup to stop the water from trembling against the rim.
The metal was cold enough to numb the pads of her fingers. It was water drawn from the deep limestone cut sixty feet below the kitchen floor, cold as meltwater off the high crags, smelling faintly of clean lime and crushed shale. Across the workshop, her father Edren leaned against the seasoned ash post with his arms folded across his chest, the soot from his forge pipe still dark upon his flannel collar. He did not look at the water. He was watching the iron latch in Ossa’s hand.
“Hold it steady, girl,” Edren murmured, his voice low enough that only she could hear it above the hiss of the pine knot burning in the hearth. “When a soul takes a new anchor, the air pulls hard toward the center. Don’t let your heels slide.”
Tessa did not move her heels. Her split-leather boots were planted firmly in the stone shavings beside the ash trestle, her thumb hooked over the handle of the battered bread knife at her hip. She had worn that knife since the morning she ran down the mountain with Noll’s first copper lie tucked into her apron pocket. She had used it to cut bread for starving children, to pry open rotten timber bulkheads in the flooded drifts, and to threaten bailiffs who came to measure her father’s scrap pile. If the stone figure on the table…
