A man could say very little in ten breaths.
He could not write a formal apology to his wife. He could not explain to eight-year-old Nell why the lantern sign of the inn was going to burn again in the fire of another dawn, nor could he explain why she would wake up tomorrow morning with no memory of the dried pear slivers she had shared with a boy named Miko. He could not explain to thirty registered Host families in Master Harl’s barn why the soup bowls they had washed that morning were going to dissolve into ash before they ever saw the sun rise over the western passes.
He could only stand in the cold mountain mud, press an eight-pound piece of twisted charcoal iron against his breastbone, and bear witness to the end of Life 9.
Sir Cael Ardent stood three paces from Jon, the blue-tempered steel of his executioner’s bodkin held point-downward in his bare right hand. The knight’s pewter breastplate was still warm from the thermal backdraft, smelling of scorched oil, boiled vitriol, and sulfur. The skin around his collar was dark with the creeping purple rot of attunement necrosis—the somatic decay that the Returner Seal exacted from its bearer with every temporal rewinding. His dark hair whipped across his blood-streaked forehead in the rising mountain gale, but his hand was steady—the steady, practiced hand of a soldier who had severed his own windpipe eight times before.
