Tobin stared at the bloodstained lead cylinder resting on Jon Hale’s scarred palm, and the pride that had kept him riding through two winters of border sleet curdled into a cold lump at the bottom of his stomach.
For two years he had polished the bronze Crown badge on his courier baldric every night with brick-dust and tallow before rolling into his straw blanket. When the village boys in the south valley spat at his stirrups and called him a King’s dog for wearing the post-horn crest after a royal provost had hanged his father over three loads of commandeered hay, Tobin had bit his tongue and spurred harder. He had told himself that the mail was cleaner than war. A courier did not burn cottages or hang carters; a courier carried the written law, the apothecary bills, the muster rolls, and the grain tariffs that kept the valley roads from collapsing into banditry.
Now he looked at his own dried blood crusted into the double-nicked lead flange in Jon’s hand, and the phantom ache beneath his right ribs throbbed in time with the drip of rain from the stable eaves.
“Cut it open,” Tobin said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, scraped thin like rawhide stretched over a saddle tree. “Not the fresh one on my back—if the chapel ward-stones or Brecht’s outriders can feel a broken seal on the live packet, we leave the live one shut for now. Cut open the one I paid for…
