The candles in the main hall of the Old Customs Exchange had burned down to pools of animal fat upon their pewter saucers.
Dawn was still two hours away. But the room was bathed in the pale, ghostly lavender glow of the Sun-Crown ring-moon filtering through the glass-and-bronze skylights. Across the long dark wood counter, four reams of royal-grade calfskin thick parchment were laid out in parallel columns, weighted down by brass measuring tongs, iron signet rings, and stone paperweights.
Ren Vale sat on a high stool, his blue linen notebook open beside him. Every twenty minutes, he paused in his writing to record a line in the notebook: The candle smells of sheep fat. Mira is asleep on the settee. My hand is stained with violet ink. It was his anchor. The careful chain that prevented his mind from drifting back into the memories of scaffolds, poison, and wives who existed only in the ash.
Ren Prime dipped his Carved Mammoth Bone Awl into a shallow stone dish of vinegar solvent, cleaning the residue of old seals from the silver metal ring.
As an unlicensed keeper in Low-Khorat, his life had been defined by scrap thick parchment and recycled pigskin. He knew the careful soul of parchment. How a sheepskin scraped during the winter rains would always retain moisture and warp under summer heat. How dark oak-ink made with bruised oak apples from the northern woods would bite deep into the connective tissue fibers, outlasting three ages of kings.
