For three straight hours as the grey Flood Month afternoon thickened toward evening, the common room of the River Lantern Inn smelled of wet wool cloaks, woodsmoke, river mud, and hot tallow dips.
They came in by lanes and by guilds—not only the forty-eight charter shareholders who had put silver crowns into the refuge box at dawn, but the ditch-diggers from Low Sike, the widowed net-braiders from North Quay, the apprentice coopers, the lime-burners, and the soot-faced charcoal carters who rented cellars along the west wall. Never in Jon Hale’s thirty-three years had he seen all of Harth’s quarrelsome trades stand in the same line without a bailiff’s halberd to keep order.
At the long oak trestle table under the center lantern beam, Jon, Elin, Lady Signe Lorr, and Corve Penner worked four quills abreast across the bound calfskin folio of the Town Ledger.
Master Baker Dunstan Harl came first with his whole household at his heels so that Line One could be witnessed in the flesh. While Marta Harl verified the weight of the sixteen sacks of bolted rye flour stored in the bakehouse loft for the common defense, Dunstan lifted four-year-old Brin in his thick, flour-dusted arms and set the toddler’s bare foot and plump right palm flat on the wide vellum margin beside his entry.
