By the second hour after midnight, the attic above Master Barnaby Thorne’s print shop was lit up by five animal fat candles set in heavy clay jars to shield their flames from the draughts leaking through the skylight. Outside, the wind howled across the slate roofs of Crown-Reach. It drove sheets of cold rain against the gable walls. But inside, the only sound was the scratch of steel nibs and the steady, rhythmic breathing of four people locked in careful labor.
The floor was covered in sprawling sheets of dry calfskin thick parchment, weighed down at the corners by lead printer’s quads and iron type-blocks. At the center of the room, Hester Quill knelt on an unrolled wool rug, her fingers blackened to the knuckles with fresh ink. Her split steel nib moved across the thick parchment with a rapid, rhythmic hiss that sounded like an adder sliding through dry leaves. Beside her, a stack of seventy historical case-rolls from the reign of Alden the First sat in three iron-bound wicker hampers, their sheepskin ties brittle with age.
Beside her sat Nessa Vale. The thirty-one-year-old land-mapper had her brass sound horn set upright on the table like a funnel, its wide bell turned toward Hester’s mouth. Nessa’s eyes, sharp and clear beneath a fringe of tangled brown hair, flicked between Hester’s lips and the sharp-angled diagrams she was drafting on a separate sheet of linen paper. With a fine-tipped brass divider, she checked the scale of the canal cross-sections, verifying…
