The check pavilion was a long, open-sided timber barn that smelled of harsh cleaning acid, burning animal fat, and terror.
At dawn, three hundred people stood queued in the freezing mud outside the barn, their boots sinking into the icy sludge. They waited for their names to be called. Soldiers with iron-shod staves kept the line tightly packed. They shouted whenever an exhausted mother tried to sit her child upon a dry luggage bundle. The morning wind drove thin sheets of sleet through the open bays of the barn, chilling the waiting travelers to the bone.
Tomas stood near the center of the queue, his ash-wood pack resting between his knees. Beside him, Nessa leaned against a fence post. Her visual attention was locked onto the raised platform at the far end of the barn where Master Apothecary Eldon Marrow conducted the morning blood assays.
Marrow was a thin, bird-like man with greasy gray curls peeking out from beneath a velvet scholar’s cap. He wore a spotless white linen smock over his wool doublet. Even so, the cuffs were stiff with dark brown stains that had never quite washed clean. On the long table before him sat twelve shallow copper saucers, an array of brass lancets, and three large glass carboys filled with clear, colorless fluid labeled Purified Vitriol and Well Spring Water.
