The kitchen of the fortress had grown larger over the two years, not by tearing down walls, but by filling every corner with the noisy, cluttered machinery of daily feeding.
Noll Vey sat on a low limestone bench near the cold scullery door, watching the steam rise from the great iron kettle suspended over the center hearth. The stone body he wore was impervious to heat and smoke, but he liked sitting near the hearth-mouth. The warmth of the birch logs soaked into his limestone thighs with a dry, pleasant persistence that reminded him of the midsummer sun on an unplastered wall.
Across the brick floor, Eske was cutting loaves of rye bread at the long maple prep-table.
The creature had changed since the day it had caught Noll’s falling stone shell on the ninth-door flags during the collapse of the siege. It was still tall—nearly a head taller than any man in Mere—and its dark wool coat hung in loose, straight folds around its narrow ribs like an old priest’s cassock. Its hands remained slightly mismatched: the left long-fingered and pale, with nails like polished river horn; the right broader, blunt-tipped, and scarred across the knuckle where an iron shackle had once held it to an auditor’s anchor-ring.
