It took an hour for the crowd in the market square to thin, and even then, fifty people refused to go home until they had put ink on their thumbs.
Noll Vey remained kneeling on one limestone knee beside the wooden water trough for the first twenty minutes because Cale and Reeve Dena Holt had discovered that the broad, flat top of his carved right forearm made a much steadier writing desk than the rounded curb of the well. One after another, shaft hands with coal-scarred knuckles, women from the spinning lanes with wool-grease on their cuffs, and carters smelling of wet harness leather stepped up to the trough, dipped a borrowed goose quill into Cale’s horn inkpot, and signed their names or their parish trade-marks below the copied text of Wagon-Transit Order Four-Eleven.
Whenever a townsman who had never stood closer than thirty yards to a dungeon core hesitated at the bottom step, staring warily at the grey chisel-marks across Noll’s crooked nose or the pale blue glimmer behind his coat buttons, Tessa Dene simply tapped the stone sleeve with her bread-knife sheath.
“Don’t mind him, Master Jori,” Tessa said briskly as the old woodcutter approached with his mittens tucked into his belt. “He’s heavier than the parish anvil and twice as drafty, and if he twitches while you’re making your cross, I’ll dock his oil.”
