Sister Oda adjusted the woolen wimple pinned beneath her chin, her rough calloused fingers pausing against the coarse weave.
In her forty-one years at the priory of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens, she had watched hundreds of souls slip across the threshold between breath and earth. She had held the cold hands of marshmen dying of the black ague; she had washed the mangled limbs of teamsters crushed beneath timber wagons; she had sung the night office over newborn infants whose lives had lasted only long enough for three drops of consecrated wellwater.
Death was no stranger to her habit. It was an ordinary, sorrowful tenant of the valley, as natural as the autumn frost that blackened the pumpkin vines.
What hovered above the earthenware vessel on the deal table was not death. It was an amputation of the spirit.
“Edda Ardent,” Sister Oda spoke aloud, her voice clear and resonant in the chilled dawn air of the bedchamber. “Daughter of Miller Ardent. Baptized in the parish chapel of Saint Jude in the third year of the previous bishopric.”
Beside her, Jon Hale stood motionless, his heavy leather apron hanging straight, his gaze fixed upon the uncoupled Returner Seal. Lady Signe Lorr continued her transcription, her quill making a dry, rhythmic scratching sound upon the Crown vellum, recording every syllable into the official inquest docket.
