The rain began two leagues south of the towpath. There, the road climbed away from the river to cross the final spur of the Red Crags before dropping into the peat marsh of Fen Hollow.
It wasn’t a summer downpour of warm, fat drops. It was the relentless, driving autumn rain of the eastern seas. It was cold, needle-fine. Then it pushed by a bitter gale from the northeast that brought the heat down to within ten degrees of freezing. Within twenty minutes, the white dust of the highway had turned into a greasy, gray paste that coated their boot soles, adding two pounds of dead weight to each footstep and reducing traction on the flint slopes to a dangerous slide.
Tomas Reed reached behind his neck. He pulled his heavy oilskin cowl forward until the flared brim shielded his eyes, and tied the chin-thongs tight beneath his jaw. The smell of boiled linseed oil, beeswax, and damp sheep’s wool right away wrapped around him. A familiar, comforting scent that had accompanied him through forty winter journeys.
He stopped, leaned his pack against a boundary stone. Then he inspected the lashing over the four Master Audit folios.
Water was the eternal enemy of the carrier. Fire destroyed quickly, but water crept in through the smallest pinhole in an oilskin seam, wicking into paper, softening fish glue, swelling wood, and turning seventy years of approved signed names into an illegible mush of blue mold and running ink.
