Jon Hale looked down at the five faces gathered around his kitchen table.
None of them were offering him an easy road. Alden Bram’s thick, lime-crusted thumbs were planted beside the sheared halves of the iron brace that had snapped across his dying arm in the ninth life. Elin’s hand rested warm and steady over Jon’s left knuckles, her bone forceps glinting dull white against her dark wool apron. Across the scrubbed oak, Lady Signe Lorr held the iron-gall reed pen poised above the leather register, while Sister Oda stood with her gaunt shoulders squared and young Tobin watched from the dresser with the solemn, unblinking attention of a twenty-two-year-old rider who had already risked a royal hangman’s noose to steer thirty refugee carts across a dark river.
They were not asking Jon to forgive Sir Cael Ardent. Nobody in this room had forgotten the thirty kegs of Crown blasting powder hidden beneath the west granary floorboards in the eighth life, or the trench knife pressed against Elin’s windpipe on the dark stairs in the fifth, or the drowned eleven-year-old girl beneath the north mill wheel whose name the royal system had covered over with gold leaf so her brother would keep fighting its wars.
