“I do not hurry, and I do not forget. Both are luxuries of the very old and the very patient.”
Chapter I
The Ledger and the Vein
Marcus Hale was born simply a boy with a merchant's surname and a talent for sums, in a port where the sea froze half the year and men counted their coins by candlelight. He learned early that numbers do not lie, do not tire, and do not die — three virtues he came to prize above all human ones. His father saw a clerk; the matriarch of House Veil, moving unseen through that plague winter, saw something colder and more durable.
