Dawn cut the town into tiers of cold light and shadow, and Isobel Hart was already up the slope, a length of plumb-line coiled over one broad shoulder, a wooden mallet snug in the other. Frost fretted the thatch of cottages and the breath of carts hung like low smoke on the road; gulls scolded inland as if they missed the salt. She moved among the stones with the deliberate impatience of a woman who had never learned to wait—the quarry’s blunt stones answered to the familiar choreography of her hands. She balanced a cube of limestone on the ball of her palm, found its center with a thumb, then ran the cheek of it with the flat of her chisel until the surface took a planedness that pleased her.
Jory Marden came up behind her with a gait that made the earth feel older: slow-footed, purposeful, the soles of his boots leaving soft hollows. He carried in his free hand a rough loaf swaddled in cloth and a mug that still smelled of last night’s peat. “You are awake too early,” he said, though his folded smile suggested otherwise.
“You know I measure time in daylight,” Isobel answered, and she set the chisel in a shallow groove, nudging away a flake that went skittering like a small silver fish. “I like to see the grain before it worries me into mistakes.”
“Grain and worry both settle on stones equally,” Jory said, passing her the loaf. “Eat; you’ll not hammer straight on empty.”
Isobel tore off a chunk and found it heavy with butter and caraway, a baker’s secret from the market that had nothing to do with the belfry but kept the town honest. The marketwoman—old Rhea, who could cuss a cartful of hay into silence—kept her ovens in a square of shadow by the river; Rhea’s bread was a small constancy amid the market’s shifting deals. The smell of it and the warmth in her hands stilled Isobel for a moment. Small comforts mattered.
The trade of masons was not polite, nor was it ladylike in the eyes of some, but she had found there a language of honest work: the snap of line, the cry of ‘Hold!’ as a block tilted on a sudden shoulder, the sure whisper of mallet on iron. She had learned to name a stone’s temper with a glance and to know, as some men knew the faces of horses, how the town’s skeleton would answer to the mortar. It was a private liturgy; there would be festivals and sermons and bread, but the skeleton—that belonged, entirely, to those who set the stones.