Dawn arrived over the Mere valley with the pale, watery gleam of wet slate.
Noll Vey watched it climb the eastern parapet, seam by seam. From his socket five feet above the floor of the Grand Hall, the morning felt thin and sharp, carrying the scent of frost-burned elderberry bushes and the sulfurous smudge of Mere’s coal chimneys drifting on the mountain draft.
Beside the center post, Prit swept the hearth flagstones with a bundle of dried heather twigs. The bone-imp steward had wiped his three chalk stubs on an oiled rag, set his ruler in the groove of his stool, and aligned his filing slate against the timber rib. Over by the cold entry archway, Sella Rusk sat on a three-legged bench, her whetstone gliding along the iron rim of her buckler.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
“She won’t come back,” Noll rumbled through the mortar seam above the mantel. “A girl like that has cousins in Mere with carting licenses. Why should she climb a frozen ditch every morning to chip old mortar off a dead man’s chimney?”
Sella did not lift her eyes from the shield boss. “Her father’s pension was erased on a clerk’s error, his chest whistles like a cracked pipe, and she has eighteen shillings left to keep them in cornmeal and bitter-root until spring. She’ll be here.”
