The composing room was thirty paces long, lined with sloping wooden type cases that held thousands of single lead-antimony type sorts arranged in the ancient wooden compartments of the printer’s lower and upper cases. everyone could feel the dust of powdered foam-stone, animal fat smoke, and the faint, sweet smell of gum arabic used in the ink varnish.
Tomas Reed stood at the central composing bench beside seventeen-year-old Olla. He held a brass composing stick in his left hand. Meanwhile, his calloused right fingers reached into the type compartments with deliberate, measured speed. His left wrist brace had been tightened to its third eyelet, supporting his scarred joint against the repetitive weight of the brass tool.
Setting type was a clockwork trade that demanded the same spatial care Tomas had used when balancing uneven crates of iron hardware on a pack frame. Every lead letter was cast in reverse, upside down, and had to be lined up against the brass gauge line with uniform spacing and perfect justification.
“Letter by letter, Tomas,” Hester Quill instructed from the high stool beside the lamp, holding the opened Master Sovereign Ledger flat beneath her magnifying glass. “Don’t modernize the spelling. Use the ancient royal script: ‘C-O-U-E-N-A-N-T’ with a ‘U’, not a ‘V’. If Iron-Hold’s lawyers see modern script, they will claim Master Kael drafted the text yesterday evening in an alehouse.”
