By early afternoon, the rain had settled into a cold, windless mist that smelled of river silt and wet willow bark around the stone buttresses of St. Jude’s bridge shrine.
Jon Hale walked across the slick granite flags of the bridge approach carrying a covered earthenware jug of warm barley-water and a clean roll of linen bandages from Elin’s triage chest. Inside the small, lime-washed nave of the shrine, only two tallow vigil candles burned beside the stone basin, their flames steady in the quiet air above the rushing weir.
Behind the carved oak rood-screen, Sir Cael Ardent sat on a low three-legged mason’s stool with his blued-steel breastplate and pauldrons unbuckled on the flagstones beside his ancestral greatsword. The twenty-nine-year-old Returner wore only his sweat-darkened linen undertunic, pulled open at the throat so Sister Oda could bathe the raw, circular ulceration where the flattened gold ring of the Bearer’s Seal pressed into the hollow above his breastbone.
Jon stopped at the screen arch, his boots making no sound on the worn stone, and set the earthenware jug down on the vestry chest.
Across ten previous lives that Jon remembered—and however many earlier returns Cael had endured alone before the brass room key ever woke Jon’s Last Guest skill—Jon had seen the Knight of the White Rose in almost every posture of command: lecturing guild masters on acceptable casualties, dueling Marshal Ors’s champions on burning parapets, or cutting his own throat with cold, mechanical precision when a flank collapsed.
