The rented garret above the cooper’s shop smelled of oak shavings, dried river mud, and cold mutton fat from yesterday’s broth. Tucked under the roof edges, its three small leaded panes looked out over the slate roofs of the North Docks toward the brown river, where gulls wheeled through the mist above the hollow clop of heavy cart horses on wet cobbles.
Tomas Reed knelt on the bare pine floorboards with a stone crock of neat’s-foot oil between his knees. Holding the shoulder strap of his ash pack-harness where sweat and road-dust had dried into the hide during the four-hundred-mile march from Bellwether, he worked the amber oil into the seams with a wool rag until the leather softened beneath his scarred thumb.
“The eastern coach leaves from the Bull and Stirrup at the seventh bell,” Hester Quill said from an upturned barrel by the window, packing her tin dispatch box with dark oak-ink powder, spare pen-knives, and linen-wrapped goose quills. “The Barons of the Appellate Court agreed to open the chambers for the People’s Bar next week. Thirty-two young clerks from the outer parishes are registered for the first lecture on the Law of Bounded Locked deposit.”
Tomas didn’t look up from his leather. “You’re staying in the capital, then?”
