Jon Hale pulled the heavy latch on the kitchen porch door, listening to the iron bar drop into its cedar catch with a hollow thud.
The taproom of the River Lantern was nearly empty. Across the wide oak floorboards, the trestle tables had been cleared of mugs, salt bowls, and tallow trimmings, leaving only the damp ring-stains where the town guards had drunk their weak barley beer between watch rotations. The high road to the north gate had gone quiet an hour after nightfall, and the war drums that had thundered along the eastern bluffs all afternoon were muted now, muffled by the low river mist creeping beneath the threshold timbers.
Sir Cael Ardent sat alone at the corner table beneath the western window.
The knight had stripped off his blued steel gauntlets and laid them across the bench beside his ancestral greatsword. His high collar was undone, the silver gorget unbuckled and set aside upon a wool bench cushion, revealing the raw, angry chafe where the imperial plate ground against the tendon of his neck. Beside a wooden trencher of cold venison stew and a half-eaten heel of rye bread lay the flattened gold ring.
It rested upon the scrubbed oak board like an abandoned coin, unthreaded from the blackened leather cord the knight wore against his chest.
