Dunstan Harl did not step down from the granite plinth. He stood on the broad second tier, his flour-dusted boots planted wide upon the gray stone, his linen apron fluttering in the cold river draft that swept the square. His wife Marta climbed the step behind him, her hands clamped tight over the shoulders of young Pip and six-year-old Lark. The boy’s nose was smudged with soot, and the little girl clutched a rag doll made of flour-sacking, her wide, round eyes darting between the armored knight below and the strange white marks circling Jon Hale’s fingers.
“You speak of armies, Sir Cael,” Dunstan said, his voice dropping from its earlier roar into a low, rasping cadence that carried an unbearable, leaden weight. “You speak of furnace flues, sapper barges, and the Crown’s grand engines beneath the hill. You speak as a knight who rides with forty horsemen at his back and calculates how many miles a messenger can cover before sundown.”
He turned his heavy head slowly, looking past the knight, past the market cross, toward the three granite tiers where Jon stood with the nine saved relics.
“Jon,” Dunstan said, his voice shaking with a quiet, terrible demand that cut through the silence of the crowd. “I do not care about the King’s high politics. I do not care about the border wars or the names of the emperors who built the stone flumes. I care about the house where my flour is ground and the beds where…
