For the four dark hours between midnight and the first gray streak of dawn, nobody in the River Lantern’s cellar slept.
Jon had sent Alden Bram and Lady Signe upstairs at one o’clock—Bram to rest his swollen knees before the morning’s masonry work and to sketch the subterranean culvert elevations by the parlor lamp, and Signe to lock her silver-point transcription of the Furnace’s golden mandate inside the iron charter chest alongside the Town Ledger. Down in the deep stone vault beneath the taproom, only Jon, Elin, and Sister Oda remained with Sir Cael Ardent.
The four foundation cornerstones of the inn held back the direct motor-control beam of the Crown Furnace, preventing the machine from marching Cael’s body up the cellar stairs like a clockwork puppet. What the house ward could not shut out was the punitive thermal feedback built into the Returner Seal itself.
Every seven minutes—in exact, merciless synchronization with the revolutions of the outermost gold ring deep inside Old Hill—the circular brand around Cael’s throat and right collarbone flared to the heat of a blacksmith’s tire-iron.
Jon had helped unbuckle the knight’s steel breastplate, pauldrons, and mail hauberk just after midnight, laying the heavy armor plates beside the wine casks because the heated metal was blistering Cael’s chest through his padded gambeson. Stripped to his sweat-soaked linen shirt and leather breeches, Cael paced the twelve-foot lane between the central oak pillar and the cider tuns like a caged wolf, his left hand clamped around his own…
