The snap of the broken eighty-percent transfer and the acrid tang of woodsmoke creeping under the wet wool doorway curtain had dragged Sir Cael Ardent up out of sixty minutes of willow-bark sleep like a drowning man breaking through river ice.
For a single disoriented second, the twenty-nine-year-old Returner stood swaying in the doorway of the back treatment chamber, his bare torso gleaming with cold sweat around Elin’s clean linen collar bandage, his blond hair matted to his forehead, and his pupils dilated wide against the smoky glare of the whale-oil lamps.
Then Cael looked down at his own bare chest—where the gold disc of the Returner Seal had hung over his breastbone through nine deaths and nine mornings—and found his hand touching only rough boiled linen and healing skin.
A sound came out of Cael Ardent’s throat that no soldier in the northern marches had ever heard him make: the raw, animal gasp of an immortal who had suddenly woken up inside a body that could die only once.
Spinning on his bare heel inside the doorway, Cael lunged back across the smeared, broken circle of cold-iron filings toward the oak side table.
The stone-lined pewter petition bowl lay on its side where his elbow had struck it as he staggered off the rope cot, spilling a dark pool of lukewarm spring water, grey basalt grit, and Jon Hale’s blood across the scrubbed oak boards—just inches from where Elin had moved the Bound Leather Ledger (#7) and the fifty-share…
