The mountain wind howled across the Oakhaven gorge with the deep, hollow roar of an iron fire, rattling the soot-stained casements of the gatehouse cellar.
Inside the vaulted chamber, the air was cold, dead, and stale. He smelled of wet wool, old limestone lime, animal fat smoke. The sharp, sour sweat of a man who knew he had crossed the line into capital treason. Orson Vance sat bound to the heavy ash-wood bench, his wrists lashed behind him with two-inch hemp cart hauling rope. His fine oilskin coat had been stripped away. That left him in a soot-stained linen shirt and gray wool trousers splattered with wet stone slurry.
Tomas Reed pulled an empty sixty-pound iron nail keg into the circle of yellow lamp-light. He sat down three feet from the bound engineer.
Tomas didn’t draw a blade, nor did he raise his voice. He sat with his elbows resting upon his knees, his hands loosely clasped between his boots. His left wrist was snug within its three-buckle calfskin brace, the scarred gristle throbbing with a dull, familiar ache in the mountain chill. But his stance was fully calm. The heavy, unmoving stillness of a cart driver who had spent nine years waiting for freight wagons to clear town scales.
