With firm, practiced strokes of her carpenter’s chalk, Sister Oda drew three concentric circles across the damp granite flagstone between the brine barrels and the sunken basalt slab.
The outermost chalk circle measured two feet across; the middle ring sat three inches inside it; and at the center she drew a tight four-inch core crosshatched like a brazier grate. From the outer ring, she sketched a straight chalk line running across the mortar joint right to the collar of the Hearth Nail under Jon’s boot.
“Thirty years ago, before the Chancellery sealed the engineering archives of the Eastern March, I served as junior infirmarian at the abbey above High Ash,” Sister Oda said, tapping the chalk against the outer ring. “They brought three stone-cutters down from the mountain works with gray ash-cough in their lungs and white frost-scars across their forearms. Before they died, I heard their confessions and copied the measurements they muttered in their fever. What sits beneath the Old Hill of Harth is one of the three surviving Crown Furnaces built during the Foundation Wars.”
Jon crouched opposite her, holding the bull’s-eye lantern low so the light caught the white chalk lines on the dark stone. “In the seventh life, when you looked at the empty cooperage alley behind the fish market, you called Ben Rill’s disappearance an unkept loss. You said the loop burned him.”
