The campfire on the southern Blackglass gravel terrace burned down to a bed of glowing tamarisk coals. It cast an amber, flickering light across the heavy thick parchment contract spread across Kezra Venn’s knees.
Forty paces away, at the edge of the dark fiery terrace, the young courier sat motionless beside his picketed bay gelding. The white willow wand stood planted in the dry earth beside his boot. Its peeled bark gleaming was pale in the starlight. He was waiting for his answer with the disciplined patience of a royal soldier who had been taught that time belonged to the Cairn Host, while cold belonged to everyone else. The horse sometimes shook its head, its bridle rings jingling with a light, metal click that carried through the thin mountain air, but the courier himself didn’t shift in his saddle.
Kezra rested her palms flat on the edges of the thick parchment. She felt the heavy, expensive texture of the calfskin parchment.
She had spent her youth in Kilnstep working with coarse grey rag paper. Sheets made of boiled linen scraps and hemp sweepings, sized with sheep fat and dried on wooden frames behind her mother’s workshop. You drew an iron sounding line on rag paper. Then, the fiber caught the nib, leaving small feathery burrs that you learned to scrape clean with a horn knife. This thick parchment was court parchment. Smooth as planed ivory, scraped thin with crescent blades, ruled with faint vermilion guidelines that guided the scribe’s carbon…
