Gray daylight crawled through the high scullery casements of the River Lantern Inn, thin and cold with river damp. It fell upon a room that had lost its center. Where four paces of scrubbed pine and dry lime-mortared flags had stood between the hearth and the pantry door, there was now only a jagged, black chasm four feet wide. The edges of the rift were crusted with charred splinters, white salt crust, and curled flakes of iron-hard ash. Below that ragged mouth, down in the cellar dark, the throat of the ancient brick flue still gave off an oily, metallic heat that smelled of scorched solder and old sulfur.
Elin stood two feet from the perimeter, her boots planted firmly on sound timber. She held her birch broom in both hands, the straw bristles blackened at the tips. With small, rhythmic strokes that scraped the sound oak boards, she swept pine cinders, shattered clay shards, and pale salt powder toward the edge, watching each small heap tumble into the void. It made a dry, rustling rattle as it hit the vitrified salt plug two feet below the blackened joists.
“Sweeping will not fill the cellar, Elin,” Jon said quietly from where he knelt near the pantry jamb.
