With a choked, rattling intake of breath that sounded as if his lungs had filled with crushed glass, Sir Cael Ardent pitched forward off his heels and collapsed onto both knees and his left elbow on the flagstones.
Jon Hale caught the young knight under the right armpit before his forehead could strike the stones, easing him back against the overturned oak bench while Elin knelt at Cael’s left side with both hands pressed against the edge of his steel gorget. Around the corner table, Lady Signe Lorr, Master Mason Marris Gault, and the forty-six shareholders of Harth stood frozen in the smoky half-darkness as the high, metallic whine coming from beneath Cael’s silver-chased breastplate climbed half an octave.
“Cael!” Jon said fiercely, bracing the knight’s trembling shoulders against his own chest while trying with his right hand to loosen the brass throat-latches of Cael’s gorget so the boy could breathe. “Stay with me, Cael—look at the lantern! Breathe slow!”
Cael tried to answer, his grey eyes wide and fixed on Jon’s face, but when he parted his lips a thin froth of ink-black foam bubbled over his lower teeth and dripped onto the silver chasing of his breastplate. Every muscle in the twenty-nine-year-old knight’s neck and jaw was corded like ship’s cable as his body fought the alchemical fire eating through the center of his sternum.
