The morning cold had crept through the plaster seams of the corner chamber, turning the air crisp and smelling of river frost.
Jon Hale poured four ounces of clear wellwater from the copper kettle into a glazed ceramic mug and walked to the bedstead. He picked up his father’s old traveling blanket—a heavy, four-ply square of homespun gray wool, rough to the touch and smelling faintly of dried woodsmoke and sheep tallow—and draped it firmly around Sir Cael Ardent’s shivering shoulders.
“Drink this, Cael,” Jon said, pressing the handle of the mug into the soldier’s trembling fingers.
Cael looked down at the dark blue glaze of the mug as though he had never seen fired pottery before. His knuckles were bruised, the skin around his nails cracked from the fever, but he closed both hands around the ceramic vessel, lifting it to his cracked lips with slow, unsteady care.
He drank.
The water was cold—drawn from the limestone spring eighty feet below the cellar flagstones—and pure, completely devoid of the mint syrups, willow tonics, and alchemical distillates that had flooded his throat for five years. He swallowed once, twice, three times, his throat working in deep, convulsive gulps until the mug was empty.
