Tessa Dene kept her left boot braced against the iron pawl of the first mechanical exit lever and her right hand resting lightly on the ash-wood grip of her bread knife.
She had forged that knife herself back in the first raw weeks of autumn from a piece of salvage tire-iron Noll Vey had claimed was tax-exempt hardware. The blade was nine inches of plain, unpolished shear steel, notched near the bolster from prying jammed sluice grates and honed flat along the belly from slicing Hobb’s winter barley loaves. It had no runes on it, no oath-silver inlay, and no royal stamp. When she pressed her thumb against the flat of the iron, it felt cold, solid, and exactly what it said it was.
Across the witness ring, Noll knelt on one basalt knee beside the tall, coal-coated figure that had just named itself Eske.
Tessa had watched Noll’s face—even when his face was only a shifting crack in damp cellar mortar, and now when it was chiseled out of hillside basalt and lime—for long enough to know every trick in his bag. She knew the brisk, tilted chin he used when he was bluffing an auditor with three copper pence in his pocket. She knew the grand, sweeping cadence he put on when he wanted a frightened room to look at his sleeves instead of the ceiling cracks. And she knew the worst trick of all, the one he used on himself when he was cornered: the jaunty, self-mocking…
