Jace
The wheel came off the cart at mid-morning. That was how the day announced its intentions.
It didn’t break cleanly — it simply departed, rolling serenely into the ditch while the cart lurched sideways and dropped, and the merchant Aldous made a sound like a man being slowly murdered as he toppled unceremoniously off the side. The two oxen stood in their traces and regarded the situation with complete indifference.
I stood in the road and looked at the wheel in the ditch.
“How long?” I asked.
Aldous’s driver, a thickset man named Petyr who communicated primarily in grunts, crouched beside the axle and examined it. He turned the wheel pin over in his fingers and looked up at me with an expression I didn’t like.
“This didn’t work loose,” he said. “It’s been pulled.”
I dismounted a
