Tam Woolmark

Sella Woolmark's brother, a Highbridge-road farmhand who went down into the Sunk Granary a week and a half ago to strip the deep bronze augers, got the last one, and never came back up the rope to spend the coin.

Tam is the younger of the two Woolmarks and the one with the good knees, which is the only reason it was him who went down the sinkhole and not Sella. He is not a delver or a fool — he took the easy upper augers first, sold them to Harvald for honest coin, and would have stopped there if stopping there had felt like enough. It did not. He wanted to be the one who carried the croft through the year single-handed, the brother who fixed it, and that wanting walked him past a chalked warning and down into the flooded lower vault after the big siege-augers that were worth a season each. He reached for one head too many with the black water between him and the tied-off rope, and the thing that has fed in that vault for four hundred years does not tire. What he left behind is a tally-book that turns from pride to dread page by page, and a last torn page that says, plainly, don't come down after me.