The last bronze vibration of the sixth morning bell died across the wet slate roofs of Harth, leaving the cellar vault beneath the River Lantern Inn steeped in the damp chill of the ninth day of Flood Month.
Jon Hale stood on the bottom stone step in his fresh linen overshirt, his right hand resting on the iron bail of the wooden wash-bucket Elin had just called for after the red-clay washbasin bowl split apart in her hands upstairs. Across the kitchen floorboards directly overhead, eight-year-old Nell’s light heels pattered toward the dormer casement, followed by the sharp, three-note wooden click of Button hopping on its one sound leg along the window sill and striking its beak twice against an empty pewter measure.
For three slow breaths before climbing to the kitchen, Jon kept his eyes on the recessed stone shelf beside the quiet, faintly humming column of the Hearth Nail.
Thirteen salvaged relics had waited on that dressed limestone before dusk of the eleventh life: the peacetime traveler’s silver spoon, the wooden spool of braided copper-iron wire that Button had once pilfered from a tinker’s pack, the burned prayer strip from St. Jude’s shrine, Cael’s double-struck brass room key and receipt, the dead soldier’s border knife, the ink-stained troop orders, the bound leather inn register, the stoppered glass vial of Cael’s earlier blood, Nell’s tiny shed milk tooth, the verdigris bronze gate fitting from the aqueduct, Signe’s carved bone stylus, Bram’s sheared iron support brace, and Tobin’s blood-crusted lead…
