Under the touch of Jon’s scarred left index finger, the protective veil of House Memory parted across the twenty-ninth folio of the bound leather ledger (#7).
Where a moment before the vellum had displayed a bland tally of salt herrings and tallow dips to Cael’s un-witnessed eyes, the ink lines shifted and darkened into the true commercial register of the River Lantern Inn as it had stood before the sixth return. Pasted into the lower right margin of the page with flour-paste was a square slip of coarse brown wrapping paper, stiffened by a broad, swirling black thumbprint of boiled pine pitch.
Jon turned the open ledger around on the slant-lid desk so the page faced Sir Cael Ardent under the combined light of the tallow stub and the bull’s-eye lantern.
“Read that entry aloud, Sir Cael,” Jon said, keeping his right thumb resting against the tarnished bowl of the silver spoon (#1) on the bar counter so Honest Measure held the space between them like an iron vise. “Tell me the name of the tradesman who hooped forty white-oak brine casks for my cellar ten days before your banner first crossed the ridge.”
Cael looked down at the brown paper slip. His face carried the patient, slightly weary condescension of a staff general humoring a provincial magistrate who insists on reading out parish culvert assessments during a war council.
