From the timber bell-rope platform on the western curve of the gallery, Tessa Dene felt the shudder in the hemp cord die out through the meat of her hand.
The hemp had been humming like a bowstring for four full minutes while the valley read aloud against the register. Her palms were yellow with dried pine rosin and scored with thin red grooves where the twist of the cord had bitten across her calluses. Below her, on the bench by the scaffold upright, her father Edren sat with his split boot braced against a limestone riser, drawing air in through his teeth with a wet, whistling rattle. He was still pressing his thumb hard against the chalked date on his pocket slate, but his shoulders had dropped two inches from his ears. Beside him, Captain Arda Dorn stood with both thumbs hooked into her buff leather sword belt, her iron-plated boots planted shoulder-width apart, staring down into the well of the room like a woman who had just watched a runaway timber wagon miss her horse by the thickness of a thumb.
“The bells are trailing off,” Edren wheezed, without lifting his chin from his chest. “Town well first. Now the pit gongs.”
