The common room of the Splitflint hostel smelled of boiled mutton, damp wool, and smoking peat.
They sat at the corner table farthest from the hearth. There, the shadows were thickest and the timber wall-post braced Fellis’s right side. An animal fat dip flickered inside an iron sconce between their tin supper bowls. They cast a yellow circle of light across the scarred frame stand table. Across the room, five sulfur wagon drivers were arguing in low, rumbling voices over a game of bone dice, their knuckles blackened with fire soot.
Fellis sat with his uninjured left arm resting flat on the boards, his fingers drumming a slow, steady beat against the timber. He had refused a second bowl of mutton broth. But he had drunk two cups of hot water steeped with willow bark and dried mint that Paxa had brewed over the kitchen embers.
“Explain the mechanics again, Venn,” Fellis said. He nodded his head toward the blank sheet of rag paper Kezra had smoothed flat between her thumbs. “Not the theory you argued with the guild test judges on the river bridge. The physical rules. If a soldier with four paces of cold steel walks into Kilnstep tomorrow, what can your mother actually do with an iron hammer?”
