They did not draft the compact at the clerk’s table. They drafted it on the lid of a flour barrel in the outer store-room, where Hobb could kick the side of every bin they named and Prit could weigh the sacks with an iron steelyard before a single number went onto the slate.
Noll Vey stood in the store-room doorway because his stone shoulders were too broad to pass easily between the stacked salt-pork casks without scraping the whitewash off the plaster. Earlier in the night, when the ninth room’s expanding banquet tables had begun bowing the lower cellar walls, Noll and Tessa had cleared every sack of barley meal, every firkin of lard, and every basket of winter turnips out of the deep vaults and stacked them here near the three mechanical-lever exits.
Now those battered barrels were the only currency in the valley that did not depend on either a dungeon core’s falsehood or an auditor’s brass machine.
“Count the bruised turnips at half-weight, Prit,” Hobb said, hefting a bushel basket onto the iron hook of the steelyard while Reeve Holt held the lantern. “If you promise a marching pikeman four pounds of sound root and hand him two pounds of frost-soft pulp, he’ll call you a thief before he reaches the tollhouse.”
