The great cobbled courtyard of the High Treasury of Crown-Reach was packed from wall to wall with twenty-four heavy postal wains. Massive, iron-tired freight carriages built of four-inch white oak, each hitched to a team of four powerful Brabant draft mares. The morning air was sharp, cold, and clear. He smelled of horse sweat, damp straw, axle grease, and the clean, metal fragrance of fresh pine sawdust.
Across the courtyard, forty veteran draymen under the watch of Sile Rook were loading heavy oak kegs from the treasury storage bays into the wagon beds. Each keg was built of two-inch seasoned white oak staves bound with four bands of hammered iron. It held three thousand pure gold sovereigns minted under the Great Seal of the Bench. Every bung-plug was sealed with a thick wafer of green beeswax embossed with the linked anchor and open book of the Commoners’ Restitution Board.
Tomas Reed stood at the tailboard of Wain Number Seven, checking the hemp lashing lines with practiced, careful care. His dark woolen smock was tucked into his leather work belt. His hobnailed boots gripped the slippery, wet cobblestones with total balance. The cold autumn wind made the deep scar along his left forearm ache with a dull throbbing. But his buckled calfskin brace held the joint rigid. That let him throw his full weight onto the hemp tie-down ropes without straining the weakened tendon. For nine years, he had hauled sacks of flour and pig iron across these same stones. Today…
