The newly whitewashed dispatch room in the former salt-court guard’s cottage at Salt-Reach smelled of wet lime plaster, fresh pine shavings, and the pungent, iron-sharp aroma of drying dark oak-ink.
Through the broad double casement windows, opened wide to the salt-scented autumn breeze, Tomas Reed could look down upon the entire bustling sweep of the lower basin. Where two weeks ago there had been only stale mud-flats and the rotting timber ribs of abandoned skiffs, the harbor now teemed with purposeful labor. Along the washed dark rock apron of the Black Shingle, fifty lightermen and shipwrights were finishing the final recaulking of The Kingfisher and The Mallard. Smoke from three portable pitch-kettles drifted across the water. It carried the rich, pine-scented smell of boiled pine tar. Meanwhile, the rhythmic thump-thump of caulking mallets driving oiled oakum into deck seams echoed off the granite cliffs.
Inside the room, Hester Quill sat behind a massive frame stand table fashioned from three clean fir planks laid across salted fish casks.
Spread out before her was the great Common Navigation Charter, its heavy sheets of calfskin thick parchment secured at the borders by four polished lead weights. In the center of the parchment rested the broad medallion of dark green beeswax, into which forty-eight delta pilots, the three village court guards of Fen Hollow, Brook End. White Steps, and Captain Wren Jalen had pressed their counter-seals.
