The stone floor of the chapel shuddered beneath Jon’s boots as another heavy stone crashed into the northern palisade.
Through the greenish bullseye glass of the high lancet windows, the sky had turned a dirty, curdled yellow, smeared with greasy soot from burning outbuildings along the marsh dyke. The wind blew from the north, carrying the unmistakable sounds of a town under assault: the sharp, splintering crack of timber palisades giving way under iron-shod rams, the distant, frantic clanging of the church bells, and the high, thin wails of women and children fleeing through the mud of the lower lanes toward the market square.
Inside the locked nave of St. Jude, the three prisoners were trapped in suffocating isolation.
Jon paced the length of the central aisle, his boots measuring five strides from the barred front doors to the altar steps, then five strides back. Each turn sent an agonizing jolt through his right wrist. The Somatic Wrist Vow—the invisible, incorporeal circle burned into the flesh of his right arm when he had sworn to witness the truth without evasion or private vengeance—throbbed with an intense, scalding heat. It felt like a band of copper wire being tightened with an iron pin, biting deep into the tendons of his forearm.
