The six-holed sheep-bone flute felt cool and unexpectedly heavy in Jon Hale’s palm. It was six inches of hollow sheep tibia, boiled in lye until the marrow was gone and then rubbed for years with beeswax and linseed oil until the ivory-yellow bone shone like old horn. Around the lower rim of the bell, someone had burned a neat ring of tiny dots with the point of a hot darning needle; near the bevelled blowing notch at the mouthpiece, two minuscule letters had been scratched into the bone with the tip of a shear-blade: A. T.
Jon held the bone cylinder up to the grey third-bell light slanting through the taproom casement so that Joran Finch, Lady Signe Lorr, and Sister Oda could see the scratched initials.
“Annis Thorne,” Jon said quietly.
Across the scarred oak table, Master Weaver Joran Finch flinched as if Jon had struck him across the bridge of the nose. The old guildmaster’s watery grey eyes widened behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, and the breath caught in his throat with a ragged, whistling rasp.
“Annis,” Finch whispered. His blue-stained thumb came up and pressed hard against the left cuff of his winter wool coat, where a neat row of unbleached flax herringbone stitches bound the frayed grey broadcloth together. “Little Annis Thorne. My sister’s youngest girl by her second marriage to the wheelwright at Oakhaven. Twenty-two years old come Martinmas.”
