Elin Hale had carried trays down the cellar stairs since she was twelve years old, and she knew the precise pitch where a loose step could spill a pitcher of small beer.
The third riser from the top was worn down in the center by fifty years of draymen’s boots, creating a shallow dip that caught the heel of a soft shoe. She stepped over it without looking down, her palms flat against the underside of the oval ash-wood tray. Upon the scrubbed wood rested two heavy pewter mugs of steaming chicory tea, a chipped earthenware crock of salted butter, and a trencher holding six thick crusts of dark rye bread, sliced from yesterday’s baking before the oven cooled.
The cellar smelled of violence.
It was not the sharp, clean reek of drawn steel, but the rank, sour breath of a man who had ridden through freezing mud without food, whose skin gave off the stale grease of fever. As she reached the bottom landing, the sight of the shattered pine bulkhead doors made her stomach clench: jagged splinters of white wood littering the flagstones, the iron latch-bar sheared in two, cold Flood Month fog drifting down the steps to mingle with the smell of pickled pork.
