In the quiet of his small garret room above the printer’s workshop in Printer’s Alley, the celebratory roar of Cathedral Square was muted to a distant, muffled hum. The cold November twilight was falling across the slate rooftops of Crown-Reach. That turned the chimney smoke to pale lavender against the darkening northern sky. Inside the room, the only light came from a single beeswax taper set in a small iron holder upon the pine wash-stand, its steady yellow flame throwing soft, elongated shadows across the whitewashed plaster walls and the rough-hewn floorboards.
Tomas Reed sat on the edge of his low timber cot, slowly unlacing his heavy hobnailed work boots. He pulled them off with a grunt of weary satisfaction. He set them side by side beneath the bed frame where the greased cowhide could dry slowly away from direct drafts. Then he reached over with his right hand and carefully unbuckled the two brass straps of his calfskin wrist brace, peeling the stiff, sweat-darkened leather away from his left forearm.
The scarred muscle tissue—thick, white. Then he puckered along the forearm bone from the hooked-blade ambush at the Bellwether canal water gate. Was cold to the touch. The third and fourth fingers of his left hand curled inward in their permanent sixty-five percent contracture. He bent the fingers slowly, feeling the stringy gristle pull against the bone. It had never healed into smooth flesh, and it never would. It was the permanent, physical tally of ten thousand miles walked…
