The cold iron of the bread knife pressed against the calluses of Tessa’s right palm.
It was an ugly tool. Her father, Edren, had beaten it out of an old leaf-spring salvaged from a broken Crown ore wagon thirty winters ago, when the mine was still paying wages in clipped copper and the valley didn’t have enough steel for scythes. The blade was broad, ground down so many times that the belly had a hollow swayback, and the handle was two slabs of river ash pinned with bent iron nails. In thirty years, it had pared turnip rinds, scraped lime scale out of flue pipes, cut rope, and sliced Hobb’s sourdough loaves. Under Mere’s ancient market charter, an unpointed knife with a rounded tip was categorized as a kitchen utensil rather than a side-arm, which meant the bailiffs couldn’t charge a toll on it when she crossed the parish ditch.
Now she had laid it on the polished limestone rail of the witness ring, right where the pale blue light of Noll’s staked core met the dark grey flags of the hall floor.
“You don’t know what you’re asking for, Tessa,” Noll said. His voice was terrible to hear. It sounded like two river boulders grinding together in a spring flood, thick with stone dust and the muffled thrum of a power that was tearing itself to pieces trying to be in two places at once. “If you take the surety, you take the clamp. If I slip—if I try…
