The leather sheath of the bread knife pressed against Tessa Dene’s hip as she stood up from the bench. It was a crude blade, ground down from a rusted wagon tyre she had pulled out of the culvert ditch back in the third week after the fire. The handle was two slabs of river ash held together with copper wire. It was not a weapon. It was the tool she used to slice salt pork, scrape dry lichen off foundation blocks, and cut grease rags for the wheelbarrows.
She walked into the circle with her boots clicking on the flagstones.
Across the low iron bar, Noll Vey stood locked in his granite collars. His limestone brow was rough, pitted with tiny fossil shells from the quarry bed, and his hands rested motionless on the rail. He did not look away as she approached. His eyes were dark hollows carved into the stone, deep and unblinking.
She could have softened it.
She had spent three hours the previous night sitting beside the kitchen hearth while Hobb boiled dried apples for the morning porridge. She had thought about how easy it would be to tell the court that the stairs had been an accident of settling mortar, or that she had lost her footing in the dark because her candle blew out. The townspeople would have nodded. The army lieutenants would have written it down as an ordinary hazard of an old ruin. It would have spared Noll the bite of the…
