Three hours before the fifth bell of Day 4, the bakehouse kitchen behind the River Lantern taproom was the warmest room left in the valley of Harth, and its warmth came from split river-alder and dry beech faggots rather than the dying machine under the hill.
Elin Hale stood at the center of the ten-foot scrubbed sycamore kneading table with her linen sleeves rolled up past her elbows and her hair bound tight beneath a white kerchief. A fine white dust of stone-ground barley meal and dark winter rye coated her forearms up to the wrists, settling over the pale skin where she had washed away the grey tallow-soot of the cellar wards.
Across the sycamore board from her, Marta Harl and her broad-shouldered husband Dunstan were working a sixty-pound trough of sour leavened dough with four-handed rhythmic thrusts—push-fold, quarter-turn, push-fold—while Bessa Karr weighed out two-pound lumps on the brass steelyard scale and Widow Clara Moss scored a deep cross into the top of each round loaf with a sharp paring knife and brushed the crust with warm brine from an earthenware crock.
Down under the end of the kneading table, curled inside an empty willow bread-basket lined with clean oat-straw, eight-year-old Nell lay fast asleep with one arm curved near Button’s glossy black wing. Every time the big brick bee-hive oven at the back of the kitchen crackled or the iron peel-blade scraped across the flagstones, the lame black rook shifted on its sound leg, checked that Elin’s skirt…
