The drafting loft smelled of shaved willow, mutton tallow, and the dry, bitter scent of aged sheepskin.
Rain lashed against the small diamond panes of the south skylight, driven by a rising gale from the northern bluffs. On the heavy drafting table in the center of the loft, weighted down with four dressed granite cubes, lay the master parchment of Harth’s river works. It was a sheet five feet across, yellowed with linseed varnish, drawn forty winters earlier by the royal surveyors who had laid the foundations of the Old Bridge.
Alden Bram stood hunched over the parchment with an iron compass gripped in his thick right hand. Two tallow candles in brass saucers stood on either side of the drawings, their flames guttering whenever the river draft found a chink in the cedar roof shingles.
“Look at the approach angle,” Bram said. His gravelly voice was low, stripped of heat, carrying the cold precision of an inquest.
The sharp steel needle of the compass hovered above the north bridgehead. With two swift, practiced turns of his wrist, Bram spanned the distance from the outer palisade gate to the first stone cutwater.
“Captain Dain placed three barricades across High Street yesterday morning,” Bram said, tapping the parchment with the compass joint. “Double-course oak baulks, breast-high, angled in a herringbone chevron toward the center ditch. Dain told the town elders the chevron would divide the enemy shock companies into two manageable files.”
