When the six-o’clock morning bell rang softly from the bridge shrine down by the river, Jon laid his hand on Cael’s shoulder and slipped the hemp timber-hitch off the central oak pillar.
Elin and Sister Oda had gone upstairs half an hour earlier—Elin to stir the kitchen porridge kettle for the forty-eight householders waking in the hall and parlor, and Oda to carry the night’s medical log and Brecht’s signed inquest roll over to the shrine archive under guard. The cellar vault smelled of cold willow-bark tea, wet stone, and the clean, nutty scent of fresh rye loaves baking in Dunstan Harl’s ovens across the lane.
As the padded linen wraps fell away from his wrists, Cael Ardent opened his eyes.
The whites of his eyes were still web-worked with burst capillaries from the night’s nerve-spasms, and around the base of his throat the skin over the Returner Seal was a raw, blistered collar of dark purple and blistered gold. Yet when he lifted his right hand off his knee and flexed the five fingers slowly in the gray morning light filtering through the cellar grate, the hand obeyed his own mind without a single involuntary twitch toward his hip.
