At five minutes before noon on the second day of Flood Month, the wind over the river valley shifted from west to north, carrying the smell of wet limestone and lathered horseflesh down from the ridge road before the watchman in the gatehouse tower had even raised his horn.
Jon Hale stood on the rain-darkened timber walkway above Harth’s north river gate, his scarred palms resting on the squared oak breastwork beside Captain Dain. Down in the shadow of the stone archway below their boots, the iron-shod portcullis hung raised on its oiled ratchet chains, and eight municipal halberdiers in greased leather jacks stood dressed in two neat files on either side of the wet cobbles.
Three paces to Jon’s left, Sir Cael Ardent leaned neither against the parapet nor the timber post. The twenty-nine-year-old Returner stood upright in his polished blued-steel plate, his white rose surcoat spotless despite the mist, his left hand resting on the wire-wrapped grip of his ancestral greatsword while his right thumb hooked uneasily beneath the high gold gorget that hid the necrotic sore at his collarbone.
All morning, since Jon and Lady Signe Lorr had shown Cael the certified copy of Dispatch Forty-Four in the shrine vestry at dawn, the knight had barely spoken ten words. He had not called the lead cylinder a forgery—not after Signe demonstrated the vinegar test on the First War Chamber’s vermilion wax and Cael himself recognized the private routing cipher of the Northern Circuit—yet the lifetime habit of…
