In the quiet hours after midnight, the attic room above the village cooperage in Split-Stone smelled of cedar shavings, damp wool, and drying dark oak-ink.
Through the dormer window, the moonlight reflected off the filled canals below. That turned the terraced mountainside into a vast stairs of silver light. The gentle, nonstop murmur of sixty miles of flowing irrigation water rose through the floorboards. A deep, rhythmic pulse that had replaced the dry silence of twenty winters.
Tomas Reed sat at the small pine table, his charcoal-gray wool tunic unbuttoned at the throat. He pulled off his left leather mitten, setting it beside his brass oil lamp. His left forearm was bare, the skin pale where the calfskin brace had supported it for three weeks. Along the inner muscle wrapping, the puncture wound from the rusted wedge in the Cauldron Vault was healing into a thick, puckered white scar, bordered by the older, faded scars of nine years of cart hauling along the Great March.
He opened and closed his left hand. Then, the ring and little fingers still dragged behind the others with that permanent thirty-five percent lag. The wrist bones clicked softly against the tendon sheath. That dull ache flared whenever the mountain air dropped below freezing. There was no miraculous recovery, no divine blessing to erase the physical cost of labor. The injury was real, permanent, and etched into his sinews.
