Sister Oda took two paces toward the iron ring, the caribou-bone stylus held between her thumb and forefinger like an illuminator’s brush. The tip of the polished bone was tapered to a blunt needle, yellowed by whale oil and decades of handling by the elder nuns of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens.
“Do not flinch, Captain,” she warned softly, pausing at the threshold of the hoop-iron circle. “Bone carries no charge of its own, but the relic in your breast has been taught to fear inspection. It will strike out with whatever it has stolen from you.”
Sir Cael Ardent sat upright on the rush-bottom chair, his shoulders rigid against the ladder-back frame. His fingers gripped his woolen knees so hard that the knuckles showed white through his windburned skin. “I am ready, Sister. Touch the metal.”
Jon Hale remained two paces behind the nun, his skinning knife sheathed at his hip, his gaze fixed upon the blackened crater over the knight’s collar wound. In the dim lantern light of the back parlor, the gold disc of the Returner Seal looked less like ornament and more like an infected root, its edges fused into charred flesh and calcified bone.
Oda leaned down. She extended her right arm, steadying her elbow with her left hand, and pressed the blunt point of the caribou bone directly against the gold rim of the Returner Seal.
