Through the Bastion stone of the outer gatehouse three hundred yards down the slope, Noll Vey heard the cobbler’s apprentice talking to the night watchman beside the brazier.
“Old Edren Dene?” the boy was saying, warming his mittens over the coals as the metallic hum from the Survey House roof settled into the cold valley mist. “Aye, my uncle remembers when the bailiffs hauled him before the magistrate in ninety-six. Caught him rubbing coal soot into his knuckles behind the tavern so he could draw sixpence a week from the widows’ chest. Never set foot down the third drift in his life.”
Standing in the doorway of the lower warm room, Noll felt that sentence hit his blue core like an iron wedge driven straight into a mortar seam.
Ten feet away from him, under the amber glow of the smokeless hearth brazier, Edren Dene sat slumped on the pine bench with Fen’s wet linen pad steaming red against his surgical scar. Every breath the sixty-one-year-old miner drew rattled through lung tissue ruined by thirty winters of Crown silver dust. Right beside the bench, inside the open wooden toolbox, the quartz nicks on Edren’s second splitting-wedge were beginning to blur and flatten just as the first wedge had done two minutes earlier.
