Elin Hale wrung out the boiled linen cloth between her fingers until the warm willow-bark infusion stopped dripping, then laid the folded square gently across Sir Cael Ardent’s sweat-sheened forehead.
Beneath her hand, the skin of the knight’s brow was no longer scorching with the dry, metallic attunement fever that had radiated through his helmet at the market cross. Under the steady slate-blue glow of the KEEPER PETITION RECEIVED script hanging above Jon’s frosted basin—where the migration counter now ticked quietly past 64% ... 66%—Cael’s body temperature had dropped back to the ordinary, living warmth of a weary man sleeping off a three-day march.
Elin lifted the edge of the compress on his sternum with her bone forceps and inspected the raw three-inch crater where the Returner Seal had been pried out of the flesh.
To her border-nurse’s eye, the change in the wound bed was extraordinary. Five minutes ago, the exposed fascia over the breastbone had been the color of charred leather, shot through with brittle black capillaries that did not bleed healthy red blood when scored. Now, as Jon’s twelve somatic marks and the fifty-shareholder foundation drew the corrosive Chancellery load out of the room into the soapstone dish, clean crimson arterial blood was oozing back into the capillary beds along the margin of the cut. The spiderwebbed black lines creeping up the carotid sheath toward Cael’s jaw had faded to a dull, fading bruise-violet, and the skin around his collarbone was turning living pink again.
