Dabrel packed by sequence and not by urgency, which meant that on the morning of the nineteenth the room above the forge contained one crate of books, a bed stripped to the ticking, and a general sitting on a chair in the middle of the floor with nothing whatever to do.
The bench was the difficulty. There was a scythe blade in the vice with the curl out of it, the chandler’s kettle waiting on a new bottom, a bill-hook that had come up from the far end of the village on Tuesday in the hands of a child who had put it down on the step and run, and two files on their nails that were not his.
Trewin came up the outside stair at eight o’clock.
He had not come up it once in nine weeks. He stood in the doorway, shorter than his own anvil, and looked…
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