The abandoned notary office on the corner of the Lower Salt-Docks smelled of dry dust, cold soot, and ancient animal glue that had dried into brittle yellow flakes.
Through the salt-streaked glass of the tall, narrow windows, the grey twilight of Val-Khorat was fading into a deep, iron-hard autumn night. The three-story brick structure had once housed the Maritime Admiralty Notaries during the reign of the Fourth High court. But it had been abandoned during the Great Flood of two-ninety. Its floorboards were warped by decades of canal moisture. Its pine shelves were lined with rotting iron-banded deed-boxes whose parchment contents had long since dissolved into grey, stringy pulp. And its iron stove sat cold in the center of the floor. It was surrounded by heaps of discarded wrapping paper.
Before her strength had given out fully, Mira had helped Ren scavenge dry pine slats from broken filing cases in the rear storeroom. They had boiled a pan of caught rainwater in a battered tin kettle found on the hearth, brewing a bitter tea of dried willow-bark that took the sharpest edge off the burning fever in Ren’s arms.
Now, in the dry corner of the office, Mira was sleeping soundly on a bed of burlap sacks and clean wrapping linen. She was wrapped in her charcoal wool shawl. Her left hand grabbed her carved boxwood thimble, her right arm resting motionless upon the pine boards. The many-sided smoky quartz of her arm was quiet now. It glowed with a…
