Chapter 3 - The Saturday Market
The market square of Ravenford was usually a place of cheerful noise—the clatter of pewter mugs from the boar’s head tavern, the high-pitched haggling over turnips, and the rich, yeasty steam rising from Hart’s Bakery every time the oven doors swung open.
Today, however, the air tasted of copper and cold iron.
Two files of guardsmen, their chainmail greaves polished for the occasion, stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the old stone whipping post at the center of the square. A crowd had gathered, though they did not push forward as they usually did for traveling puppet-shows or wool-merchants. They stood back near the eaves of the butcher’s shop and the apothecary’s porch, their hands shoved deep into their pockets, their faces grim and set.
Eleanor stood between two guards, her wrists bound in hemp that bit sharply into her skin. She wore her everyday wool kirtle, the hem stained with flour-dust from her morning shift. Her father, old Thomas Hart, was being held back by three men near the bakery door, his face purple with fury as he shouted curses that the drum-roll tried to drown out.
Magistrate Crowe stood on a wooden staging beneath the town clock, holding the parchment scroll out as if it were a scepter.
"Let it be known," Crowe’s voice echoed off the timber gables, sharp and clear, "that Eleanor Hart, daughter of Thomas Hart, has willfully and repeatedly violated Crownland Statute 12-B by maintaining unauthorized contact with a hostile leviathan. For three years, she has harbored, fed, and communicated with an unregistered danger to the public peace."
Crowe paused, looking expectantly for the usual nods of approval from the burgesses. Instead, the square remained dead silent. Even the dogs had stopped barking.
Eleanor lifted her chin, her hair—usually braided neatly—falling loose across her shoulder where a guard had roughly shoved her. "It’s not hostile," she called out, her voice steady enough to carry across the stones. "And it’s not a weapon. It’s half-starved, and it hasn't left the gorge since the winter the snow reached the second-story windows."
Crowe’s eye twitched. He rolled the parchment slightly. "You admit to the feeding, then?"
"I gave it bread we couldn't sell," Eleanor said, her golden-brown eyes fixed squarely on the magistrate’s polished boots. "If that’s treason, Magistrate, then your kitchen must be full of traitors every time you throw out the crusts."
A low, muffled sound—half-cough, half-laugh—rippled through the butchers near the well.
Crowe’s face flushed a dark, mottled crimson. "Insolence will not alter the sentence. Twelve lashes, administered publicly, to impress upon this town the gravity of crown law." He snapped his fingers toward the executioner—a broad-shouldered man in a leather jerkin who looked as though he would rather be cleaning stables. "Proceed."
May you like
The executioner stepped up behind Eleanor, lifting the braided leather whip. He did not look at her face; he stared fixedly at the weather-vane atop the municipal hall.
At that exact moment, three miles away up the gorge, the dragon raised its head.
