The gray river fog began to lift from the cobbles, chased by a thin, watery sunlight that turned the slate gables of the market square the color of wet lead. The dampness clung to wool coats and sheepskin collars, but no one in the crowd moved toward the shelter of the shop eaves. The silence that had fallen over Harth was not the quiet of reverence; it was the paralyzed, suspended stillness of a courtroom where a death warrant has been read aloud before the jury has even sat.
Jon knelt again on the cold granite tier. His right hand reached out, his thumb and forefinger closing around the small, worn oval of the brass key.
As his skin touched the cold metal, the somatic ring circling his right ring finger pulsed with a faint, deep prickle of frost—not the searing pain of a broken covenant, but the quiet, physical confirmation of a trust that had survived nine destructions of the flesh. He rose, holding the key aloft between his fingers so that the pale morning sun struck the yellow metal.
It looked like any householder’s key in the valley: three inches of cast brass, a simple oval bow stamped with an imperial crown, and a straight shank cut with two square wards suited for a mortise lock in a solid oak door. But where the metal joined the bit, the surface was scored by thousands of microscopic scratches, worn so smooth that the original milling ridges had vanished into…
