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On a feast morning in sixteenth‑century Seville, a master carver exposes secret papers hidden beneath a donated choir stall. Confronted with patronage, clerical power, and public spectacle, she must barter her safety to secure sanctuary for those marked by a corrupt network.
The light that fell through the high, arched window of the workshop carried the dust of the cathedral like a second sky. It lay in thin, golden sheets across the long benches and pool of plans, across shavings that curled like small, pale scrolls in the sun. Isabel Serrano measured a seat for one of the choir stalls as if it were a promise; her hands moved without waste, feeling for the heart of the wood, for the grain that would take a curve and hold it. In Seville the church’s new furniture was commerce and devotion at once, and the city’s talk of piety and favor could be as lucrative as a guild contract. For Isabel, each commission kept the workshop’s hearth and the mouths that clustered around it from going cold.
She had learned the trade beneath the stern eye of a man who had been her husband. His name still lived in the grooves he had cut and the order he left behind: measure twice, chisel once; carve the story only if the wood welcomes it. His hand was gone two winters, taken by fever, and the small shop on the calle had become hers by memory and by the modest goodwill of the parish. She kept a ledger only in her head—orders promised, deadlines, the apprentices owed coin—and when the wealthy brought patronage it was as much a blessing as a dangerous braid of obligation. Doña Luisa’s gift to the cathedral was more than a donation; it was a public affirmation of place and taste, and the commission that came to Isabel’s bench was both honor and necessary toil.
She worked with a few apprentices, but she kept the finer work to herself: the faces that emerged from oak, the tiny angels that leaned into each other's wings, the carvings that would be seen every Sunday when the choir sang. The stall seat she was fitting that morning had a small, stubborn gap where two boards met. It annoyed her, not because it would be visible but because it refused the simple order she preferred in her mornings: a problem tended now, no fuss later. She pried at the seam with the tip of her knife, thinking of the hammer, thinking of the way the city sealed things up—a convenient fold here, a tight nail there—and felt with the tip of that blade a small give of leather and thread under the wood.