Through the fourth brass passage token—pinned inside the collar of Hesta Quill’s sodden velvet traveling mantle—Noll Vey heard the unmistakable sound of a wooden fish crate creaking under a player’s boots.
It was mid-afternoon in Mere, with ninety-three hours remaining on the Last Guest’s clock. A cold, sleety rain was blowing across the market cross, turning the packed mud between the market stalls into grey grease.
From his stone vantage in the fort above, Noll listened to the valley with his Dominion sense. The town square was crowded with people who had come for spring water and stayed out of dread. Two hundred weavers, carters, and ditch-diggers stood in wet frieze coats, their shoulders hunched against the sleet. Most of them could not read the Latinate contractions on Cale’s credential rolls; to them, a folded parchment was simply the thing a bailiff brought before he took the family pig.
“Stand up straight, Beric,” Hesta’s voice crackled through the brass token, sharp as vinegar. “And take that tragic tilt out of your chin. You are not dying on the ramparts of high Trevane; you are reading an administrative notice to thirty weavers whose boots leak.”
“Mistress Hesta,” a youthful, plaintive voice protested. “The rhythm of the third paragraph demands a rising cadence. When I announce the dissolution of the Crown command charter, the audience expects a brass fanfare, or at least a roll on the snare.”
