The large deal table in the front room of the Black Swan Inn was covered in sheets of heavy rag thick parchment weighted down at the corners with iron carriage bolts, brass inkstands, and lead line-weight-bobs.
Tomas Reed stood over the central sheet, an ink-stained bone scraper in his right hand and a pair of brass dividers in his left. For seven hours, since the tithe barn had been sealed, he and Hester Quill had worked in silence, checking every single number against three independent sources. The exchequer payout rolls from Year 021, the buried lime pit survey measurements. The bundle of one thousand four hundred and twenty ration slips collected from the veterans’ huts.
The fire in the stone hearth crackled softly, burning dry willow logs that smelled of bitter sap and peat smoke. Outside, the wind howled around the inn’s roof edges. He drove sleet against the diamond-paned casements with the rattle of dry corn. The animal fat candles on the mantle had burned down to their tin saucers twice, their greasy smell mixing with the sharp tang of iron dark oak-ink and the vinegar wash Tomas kept in a wooden bowl for his wrist.
The innkeeper, an elderly man named Garrow whose nephew had died in the ditch at Bastion-Nine, had locked the heavy oak street door at dusk. Every half-hour, Garrow came quietly into the parlor to lay another turf brick on the hearth. His wool slippers shuffled across the floorboards without a sound. He didn’t…
