The animal fat candle on Tomas Reed’s workbench guttered in the draft from the river alley, throwing long, trembling shadows across the thick parchment spread before him.
Outside, the freezing drizzle had turned to sleet again, drumming steadily against the shake roof of the Office of Unfinished Claims. In the corner, apprentice Olla sat on a low stool with her knees drawn up, dipping an iron-gall quill into a horn inkpot and copying the serial numbers of Old Branden’s twenty-four vouchers into the office intake register. Her hand was steady, but her breath rose in thin white plumes in the unheated front room. They couldn’t burn peat near the open vellums, for peat smoke left an oily soot that fouled the tooth of old calfskin.
Tomas sat with his sleeves rolled to the elbows. His left arm lay flat against the scrubbed pine board, pale in the candle flame, the long, puckered scar running diagonally from the inner wrist up into the meaty belly of the forearm. He pressed the ball of his right thumb into the gristle at the base of his third finger. The tendon felt like a soaked hemp cord that had frozen and thawed too many times. Stiff, unbending, and throbbing with a dull ache that went straight into the bone.
