Rather than climbing up into the crowded cobbles of South Lane, Jon walked back to the River Lantern through the subterranean gallery they had cut that morning—stepping from cellar to cellar under twenty neighbors’ floors, ducking beneath the cured-oak lintel shores that held up the houses of Harth, and emerging through Dunstan Harl’s bakehouse vault fifty paces from his own courtyard.
When he came down the stone steps into the River Lantern’s cellar vault, the air inside the four-cornerstone boundary felt cool and still after the baking draft of the hill breach.
Across the room by the central oak pillar, Sir Cael Ardent sat resting on a low straw pallet with his back against the dressed stone and a fresh wet linen compress tied around his throat, his eyes closed as he conserved his strength inside the house ward. Over by the standpipe box, Sister Oda was logging the latest water temperature in her pocket register.
Jon walked straight to the heavy oak plank shelf mortared into the west foundation wall between the first and second cornerstones.
There, arranged in their strict, unchanging order from left to right, rested the fourteen physical objects he had carried across the resets at the price of the ten white rings on his fingers, the two vows on his wrist, and the four broad bands on his forearm.
