By mid-afternoon, the Gray Pit had ceased to be a prison and had become a castle of lawful custody. Under Sile Rook’s direction, the disarmed hired blades were marched down the mountain road under an escort of ten senior stonecutters. Their weapons were locked in the tool magazine.
Captain Skarn and Administrator Krend were confined inside the heavy oak-and-iron weigh-master’s cage, guarded by six veteran splitters whose fathers had died in the Deep Gallery. There was no violence. There was no riot. Mountain stonecutters understood discipline better than any soldier. They preserved the prisoners as living exhibits for the court.
In the dry, heated office of the weigh-house, Tomas Reed sat at the master oak desk. Beside him stood Mara Flint, gently unbuckling the three-inch iron buckle of his calfskin wrist brace.
When the leather was drawn away, Mara hissed softly through her teeth. Tomas’s left wrist and forearm were swollen twice their normal size, the skin bruised a dark, mottled plum color along the old tendon scar. The wrist joint was hot to the touch, streaming feverish heat from the huge strain of holding seven hundred pounds of suspended children on the chimney ladder.
Mara dipped a clean linen cloth into a bowl of warmed vinegar infused with wild mountain arnica and comfrey root. She wrapped the compress firmly around the joint, binding it with strips of clean bleached wool.
