At seven o’clock in the morning, the rain over Harth had thinned to a cold, blowing mist that smelled of river ice and wet slate roofs.
Around the stepped stone base of the market cross, sixty townsfolk stood huddled in oiled wool cloaks and leather aprons while Master Mason Marris Gault and Alden Bram stretched a fifty-foot red-chalked mason’s cord along the cobblestones of South Lane from the upper mill-race sluice down toward the low hollow of the fish market.
These were not the panicked, bewildered crowds Jon had watched scatter before royal proclamations or Ash Host fire-arrows in earlier lives. Every household head standing around the cross—Dunstan Harl with flour still dusting his heavy forearms, Widow Clara Moss with her wool-shears at her girdle, Master Weaver Joran Finch, Bessa Karr the Mistress of Salt and Tallow, and sixteen of their immediate row-house neighbors—held a stamped parchment receipt for a share in the Bound Common Charter tucked inside their coats. They knew that Royal Assay Warden Brecht lay dead in the bathhouse by his own assassin’s blade, and they knew that the warm, sulfurous vapor curling up from the street-drain grates meant the mountain root beneath their boots was running hot.
