Three months after the venting of the subterranean shaft, in the warm, golden middle of Harvest Month, the afternoon sun slanted through the open casement of the ground-floor parlor at the foot of the River Lantern’s main staircase and fell across a heap of newly fulled grey wool cloaks.
Widow Clara Moss sat in her cushioned armchair beside the low window sill, a horn-rimmed pair of reading spectacles perched on the bridge of her nose and a bone sewing-needle glinting between her nimble fingers as she whipped a double hem of waxed linen thread around the collar of a mason’s winter coat.
During the eleven loops of the siege, Clara Moss had been driven out of her riverside cottage behind the cooperage twice by rising floodwater and three times by falling trebuchet stones, spending the nights shivering on a straw pallet in the draughty Guild Hall vestibule. Now, as Shareholder Number Fourteen of the Harth Civic Trust, she occupied the brightest ground-floor room in the inn—three steps from the kitchen kettle, completely level with the courtyard flagstones so her arthritic knees never had to climb a dark stair, and paid twelve silver marks a year from the trust chest to oversee the mending of the work-crews’ woolens.
