Chapter 17: The Switch

Every door on the forge street had been written on. The chalk sat at shoulder height in a boy's fat hand, grey with dew. None on the baker's shutter and the farrier's. Faint on the chandler's and the ash-seller's gate. On Orin's lintel one word in capitals the height of a hand, CLEAR, smeared where a sleeve had caught it. At the town end, forty paces off, a lean man in a good grey coat stood in the baker's doorway with a plate on a strap round his neck. White face, brass ring. His boy chalked the doorpost behind him. Orin stood in the forge door. Kael stopped at his shoulder. "Strake," Orin said. "The Academy's licensed residue examiner. The Company hired him for the sweep through the Marches." The ash-seller's boy sat on his barrel across the road with a new bit in his cheek, watching the forge's side…