Long after the cracked twelfth stroke of midnight died across the river mist, the River Lantern Inn settled into the deep, breathing silence that only its proprietor knew how to read.
Jon Hale sat on the third stone step below the cellar door with a darkened bull’s-eye lantern resting between his boots and his elbows braced on his knees. Through the heavy oak door panel at his shoulder, the warmth of the kitchen range seeped down the stairwell, carrying the faint domestic scents of banked ash, dried chamomile, and the rosemary salve Elin rubbed into her wrists before sleep. Upstairs in the rear family loft, behind a bolted ash door that Jon had reinforced with iron strap-hinges during the fourth loop, Elin and Nell were asleep with Button roosting on the footboard post.
Down here in the dark, Jon kept his ten-ringed palms pressed flat against the dressed-granite cheeks of the stairwell wall, listening to the timber and stone of his house through House Memory.
To an un-attuned sleeper, an old timber-framed river inn at night was full of random pops and winter creaks as the cured oak beams cooled after the taproom fires went out. To Jon, every mortise, tenon, peg, and floorboard inside the four cornerstones registered as a distinct string on a lute.
