The covered rope-walk shed smelled of boiled linseed oil, Stockholm tar. The dry, sweet dust of combed Baltic hemp.
It was a long, narrow timber gallery running behind the Dain family workshop, open to the evening breeze on the orchard side but roofed with thick cedar shingles to keep rain off the long laying-spindles. At the far end, twenty paces down the packed dirt aisle, a massive eight-inch square oak tie-beam crossed the rafters, heavily notched from thirty years of testing wagon traces, mine cables, and well tackle.
Fellis Dain hung his wool coat and grey linen work-shirt over an empty hemp reel. That left his torso bare in the cool evening air.
In the yellow light of two pierced-tin lanterns held by Kezra and Maud, the scar on his right shoulder stood out like a pale, puckered seam against his lean, sun-browned muscle. It ran from just below the outer tip of his collarbone diagonally across the front edge of the shoulder muscle, vanishing into the flesh behind his armpit. The path of the iron-tipped needle-point arrow that had punched through his leather jerkin at Splitflint Hostel forty days ago.
Paxa Sel didn’t ask him how he felt. She stepped up behind him, dipped her fingers into a small pot of unsalted hog’s lard. Then she began working her thumbs directly into the tissue around the scar.
