The smell of wood smoke from the ridge had begun to seep through the upper chimneys, but down in the lower corridor before the ninth door, the air remained dense with the scent of cold obsidian and old lime mortar.
Tessa Dene stood with her boots set firmly on the split flagstones, her calloused hands resting upon her hips. She was not a tall woman, but in the amber wash of the brass lantern she occupied the narrow gallery with the unshakeable solidity of an iron gatepost.
“Ugly does not mean guilty,” Tessa said, looking squarely at the small pale mask floating within the black-glass frame.
The words were spoken without poetry or false comfort. They were delivered with the same dry, workaday certainty she used when sorting bent iron nails from good spikes behind the forge.
“My father’s face is scarred from furnace flares,” she continued, her voice level and even. “His left eyelid is pulled sideways, and his lungs rattle like dry gravel whenever the weather turns damp. Half the boys who work the coal barges on the river have their noses broken from swinging booms. If we ran out of town every person who looked like an ill-made chimney, Mere would have three people left and nobody to haul the flour.”
