The wax rubbing of the Salt-Marsh Truce smelled of tallow, cold limestone dust, and the damp hem of Cale’s wool coat.
Noll Vey held his heavy stone palms an inch above the parchment without touching it. His carved limestone fingers were still rough around the knuckles where Tessa had chiseled the mortar joints out of old stable lintels two days back, and he did not trust their weight on four-hundred-year-old proof. Across the trestle table of the Grand Hall, the fuel-less hearth burned with its steady, smokeless amber glow, throwing long shadows over Prit’s three-legged stool and the scarred oak boards where Hobb had pushed aside two bowls of cold barley mash to clear space for the rubbing.
“Read the last line again, Cale,” Noll said. His voice came from the mortar seam across his stone throat with a dry, gravelly rasp that sounded like two millstones settling into gear. “Slowly. Pretend I am a bailiff from Greyford who only reads words of one syllable unless someone pays him a groat.”
Cale braced both ink-stained thumbs against the corners of the butcher’s paper. His eyes were rimmed with red from the previous night’s relay reading in the scriptorium, yet his voice had the clean, brisk snap of an auditor who had finally caught a balance sheet trying to pick his pocket.
