A showman who cannot lie is merely a carpenter with delusions of grandeur, and Noll Vey had never cared for sawdust in his cuffs.
He had no cuffs left to worry about—only five rooms of damp fieldstone, a freshly chipped rim on his blue core niche that still ached like a pulled tooth in the morning draft, and a public slate hanging beside Prit’s filing ledge where every soul in the Grand Hall could read his past sins in neat white chalk. Above that slate, the heavy ceiling beam he had shifted the evening before sat level in its new mortar seat. Below it, Tessa Dene stood with her boots planted wide on the flags, scraping dried lime off a sheet of flattened roof tin with the back of her salvage bread knife.
“Tilt the left frame another thumb’s breadth toward the drain,” Noll called through his mortar-crack mouth, watching the grey morning light slide down the western corridor from six wall seams at once. “If a guest walks in with the sun behind his shoulder, I want his own coat coming back at him from three corners before his second step. It makes a five-pace passage feel like a cathedral.”
