Reeve Dena Holt’s back parlor smelled of dried winter apples, beeswax polish, and old legal sheepskin. The room sat tucked beneath the overhanging eaves of the municipal clerk house, its diamond-paned leaded windows obscured by thick woolen curtains that kept the street noise of Mere muffled to a distant rumble.
On the round cherry-wood table, three bound statutory volumes lay open beside Hobb’s blackened iron brazier.
“You are not walking through that clerk door, Cale,” Tessa Dene said. She stood beside the corner cupboard, scraping dried tallow from the brass rim of her passage token with her salvage bread knife. Her voice was flat, hard, and entirely devoid of patience. “You are not walking past the side-street sentries, you are not touching that iron latch, and you are not pretending to be a frightened junior copyist looking for an extra bottle of gall ink.”
“Tessa, you do not understand how the Survey House works,” Cale argued, waving his ink-stained fingers in frantic agitation. “I sat at that third cedar desk behind the railing for four years. Senior Clerk Mallow called me ‘the third pen from the window’ because he could never remember whether my family name was Cale or Cole. When the bailiffs had their morning ale on the landing, they stepped over my boots without ever looking down. I was the dullest clerk in the entire district. If I walk through that door with an armful of tax files, they will see a stool with legs, not an enemy.”
