The rain over Crown-Reach was falling in heavy, cold sheets that turned the soot-blackened cobbles of Printer’s Alley into slick, glistening mirrors reflecting the gas lanterns of the taverns. At three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the narrow lane between the High Exchange and the river wharves smelled of boiled linseed oil, turpentine, damp rag paper, and the pungent, clear reek of hot pitch and printer’s ink.
A closed cart driver’s wagon, its canvas tilt darkened by thirty miles of country mud, backed smoothly into the covered loading bay of Caxton & Sons, Sovereign Printers and Stationers. Sile Rook sat on the driver’s box, his slouch hat pulled low over his scarred forehead, his iron-wood hooked pruning blade resting inconspicuously beneath a folded horse blanket beside his boot. The wagon wheels came to a halt against the granite curb. Then, Sile tapped the front board twice with the butt of his whip.
The small oak wicket gate in the printing shop’s heavy timber doors clicked open. A small, wiry man of sixty winters, wearing an ink-stained apron of split pigskin over a gray wool waistcoat, peered out through horn-rimmed glasses into the pouring rain. Master Tobias Caxton was third-generation printer to the City of Crown-Reach. His grandfather had printed the first coronation proclamations for King Alden the Third, and his presses had produced five decades of parish broadsheets, market schedules, and banned pamphlets for the dissenting guilds.
