The morning rain over Low Bellwether carried the sharp, rotten-egg stink of damp coal and drowned animal fat from the river wharves. It beat against the greased paper panes of the front casement in a rhythmic, dragging hiss, leaking a cold draft across the pine frame stand table where Tomas Reed sat with his sleeves turned back to the elbows.
The leather wrist brace lay unbuckled on the table beside a small horn jar of sheep fat and bitter pine-resin. Tomas rested his left forearm flat on the scrubbed timber, spreading his fingers against the grain. The puckered white furrow of the tendon scar pulled tight from the base of his palm halfway to his elbow. The legacy of the rusted water gate-iron from the Western Culvert months before. He closed his fist slowly, testing the joint pushback. The surgeon at the town sick room had told him plain that no tonic would knit torn sheath back to its former youth. To haul seventy pounds of freight without dropping the ash pack-frame, he had to rub animal fat into the scarred skin and buckle the stiff calfskin strap before lifting an iron hasp.
Across the room, Apprentice Olla was trimming goose quills near the peat fire bowl with steady strokes of her small bone-handled knife, her fingers stained blue-black from oak dark oak-ink. Above her head, the four-foot ash-wood pack frame rested on its iron pegs, newly lashed with tarred hemp rope.
