The candle on the stone lectern burned with a sputtering, greasy flame, fueled by rendered sheep fat that smelled of burned wool.
Ren Vale sat hunched over a sheet of rough scrap thick parchment, his carved ivory awl poised three inches above the surface. He was trying to write a simple supply order list for the lower holding pens—twenty yards of coarse linen, ten pounds of lime, four bundles of willow bark. Mundane, ordinary words that any apprentice keeper could pen in his sleep.
His hand stayed frozen.
He looked at the word willow.
He knew what willow was. It was a tree with pale green leaves that grew along the irrigation canals of the Blackwater Basin. Its bark tasted bitter and relieved fevers when boiled in spring water. But when he tried to remember where he had first learned that fact—the memory of sitting on a wooden bench beside old Master Varner. He watched the old man’s ink-stained fingers peel the damp bark from a freshly cut branch—there was nothing.
Master Varner was gone.
The face was gone. The voice was gone. Even the name felt like an abstract legal concept, a series of syllables he had read in an old town tax registry rather than a man who had clapped him on the shoulder and taught him how to scrape parchment without cutting the grain.
