Inside the River Lantern kitchen, the Warm Room aura of the four cornerstones held the raw autumn night completely at bay.
Outside the shuttered casements, a cold forty-mile gale off the north river hills was driving sleet and rain horizontally down the dark lanes of Harth. Inside the limewashed stone walls of the kitchen, the cast-iron range ticked with glowing red beech-coals, the copper kettle hummed a low domestic bass note on the side trivet, and the scrubbed ten-foot oak table in the center of the flagstones felt as dry and solid as the deck of a well-caulked ark.
Jon stood at the range with a long-handled wooden ladle in his scarred right hand, filling five deep brown earthenware mugs with steaming mutton-and-barley broth thickened with chopped leeks and dried garden parsley.
At the center of the table, Elin set down a round wooden trencher holding a four-pound loaf of Dunstan Harl’s dark sour rye—still warm from the residual heat of the brick baking-oven—alongside a crock of salted churn-butter and a small stoneware dish of pickled river-walnuts.
Around the scrubbed pine boards sat a council that no previous cycle of the Siege of Harth had ever seen gathered under one roof.
