The market cross bell struck seven times, each stroke falling heavy and flat through the low river mist that hugged the cobblestones of Harth’s public square. It was the bell traditionally rung for flood watches or a breach in the mill dike, a slow, unhurried toll that brought craftsmen from their benches and shopkeepers from behind their counters with aprons still tied and tools clutched in work-hardened hands.
By the fifth stroke, the open space between the town hall steps and the granite base of the market cross was choked with nearly two hundred people. The fifty shareholders of the Common Charter stood at the front, shoulder to shoulder, forming a ragged semi-circle around the weathered plinth. Behind them crowded their apprentices, carters, weavers with wool lint clinging to their caps, and fishwives from the North Quay with brine-soaked sacking pinned over their shoulders.
Master Dunstan Harl pushed through the front rank, his white linen apron smudged with rye flour and black wood-ash from his ovens. His broad, dough-pale face was set in lines of belligerent exhaustion. Beside him stood Marris Gault, her stone-mason’s hammer hanging from the leather loop at her thigh, her graying hair tucked behind ears crusted with granite dust. Behind them, Garrick Holt, the master smith, towered half a head above the drapers, his massive forearms folded across his leather jerkin, his dark eyes suspicious and watchful.
