Moving an oak cross-beam without hands was like balancing a greased broom handle on the tip of one’s chin while three bailiffs argued at the back of the tent about the price of lamp oil.
Noll Vey held his focus tight in the upper western socket of the Grand Hall, where forty years of hill wind and leaked sleet had rotted the old lime bedding into grey porridge. Through the damp skin of the masonry, he could feel every split fiber of the squared timber. It weighed near eleven stone—just inside the upper allowance of his Hearth-rank reach, provided no pigeon, rat, or stray ranger happened to lean an elbow against the post while he worked. Under the Right of Occupancy that had settled into his core alongside the fuel-less stove, the stone refused to budge so much as a splinter if the shift threatened to pinch a living guest inside the room.
Easy now, Noll told the wall, coaxing a ribbon of fresh, stiff mortar into the notch beneath the beam’s butt end. Up a fingernail on the left. Let the runnel tip toward the outer eaves instead of straight down onto the flagstone where everyone wipes their boots. A house with a dry roof and a wet threshold is merely a puddle with ambitions.
