The cedar plank inside the chimney wall smelled of dry sawdust, beeswax, and old smoke that belonged to no fire burning in Harth today.
Jon set the tallow saucer on the stone ledge at the left of the recess and rested both wrists against the cool ashlar margin. Across the rough-planed cedar board sat the nine objects that had survived the first six returns, arranged in the exact order his hands had claimed them out of the dissolving dark.
He did not trust his eyes alone after a rollback; the mind could play tricks when five days of noise collapsed into a single sixth-bell chime. Instead, he audited the shelf the way he audited the winter larder before Frost Month—by touch, by weight, and by the specific trade limits bound into each piece under the Last Guest Protocol.
His right thumb brushed the first position on the far left of the plank.
There lay the heavy fiddle-pattern silver spoon (#1), tarnished to a soft pewter gray in the bowl and stamped with the hallmark of a southern guild assay office. A cloth-merchant’s factor had left it with Jon as a security deposit for a winter horse-hire two weeks before the first return ever struck, promising to redeem it when the spring barges came upriver. Because that pledge had been standing in the house strongbox when Cael’s Hearth Nail first woke beneath the floor, the spoon formed Jon’s baseline trust. Its rules were as strict as they were narrow: Jon could…
