For forty years, Alden Bram had framed roof-trusses and hung ridge-beams across the river valley by eye alone, judging to a quarter-inch how an oak peg thrown from the floor would strike a mortise twenty feet overhead. He had built the stone weir at the lower mill when Jon Hale was still in swaddling clothes, he had scarfed the great white-oak tie-beams of this very taproom after the winter gale of his thirtieth year, and he knew every iron hook, joist-hanger, and plumb-line in the River Lantern Inn better than he knew the creases of his own palms.
Standing in the pantry arch with his iron-shod measuring rod braced in his left hand and the heavy three-legged cobbler’s stool cocked in his right, the seventy-year-old master mason saw instantly that neither Jon Hale’s descending pewter platter nor Sir Cael Ardent’s rising parrying dagger would beat the straight-line lunge of Tomas Brecht’s black poison needle unless two things happened in the same tenth of a second: the yellow glare of the central oil lamp had to vanish before Brecht’s eye locked onto the blue vein on Cael’s bare right wrist, and the assassin’s left shoulder had to be knocked three inches off its plumb-line.
