“I would never have said such a thing,” Noll Vey answered at once, and the mortar seam below his niche vibrated so hard that a flake of dried lime pattered onto Prit’s stool. “Tessa, use your head! Why on earth would I rot the fingers off the only mason in the valley willing to clear my drain? A landlord who cripples his own plumber drowns in his own cellar before Sunday!”
Tessa stood beside the stone bench with her hands still held out a little from her sides, palm up, where the grey clay from the western culvert had dried into the deep creases across her calluses. She did not raise her voice. She did not reach for the iron pry-bar lying on the pine planks beside her knee, nor did she touch the bone handle of the bread knife at her hip.
“You told me the west stair was cursed five minutes before you offered me the coin,” she said.
“Because you were prying a brass hinge off my doorframe with a bread knife!” Noll said, the words tumbling out of the stone in the quick, persuasive rhythm he had used for thirty years whenever a crowd began to reach for turnips. “A man wakes up dead in a wall, soaked to the mortar, with no hands, no boots, and a one-eared rat still digesting his binding cord, and the first human soul who walks through his door starts dismantling his woodwork for scrap! What was I supposed to…
