Jon Hale stepped across the inner circle of cold-iron filings and river salt, planted his boots squarely on the scrubbed pine floorboards beside the corded cot, and lifted the stone-lined pewter basin in both hands.
The vessel was heavy—nearly twelve pounds of cast valley pewter fitted around a turned inner bowl of grey river-soapstone that Alden Bram had hollowed on his lathe two winters ago to hold hot broth in the taproom without scalding the oak tables. Today it held six inches of icy spring water drawn from the deepest gravel stratum under the scullery pump. As Jon’s ten ring-marked fingers closed around the wide pewter rim, the water inside lay flat as a mirror under the yellow whale-oil lamps.
At the middle boundary line behind him, Sister Oda planted her feet apart, laid her right hand over the char-edged prayer strip from St. Jude’s shrine (#3) at the threshold, and began to chant the restored Keeper’s repair hymn.
She did not sing it in the high, nasal court plainsong used by the royal chaplains in the capital. She pitched her voice into the low, working work-cadence of the ancient Oakhaven bridge-masons—the suppressed fourth stanza she had recovered from the palimpsest scrolls beneath the shrine altar in the eighth life, where the rhythm of the words matched the four-beat drop of a pile-driver setting cedar timbers into river bedrock.
