By ten o’clock that night, the twenty digging crews had climbed up from the cellars, washed the gray lime dust and marsh clay from their hands at the horse-troughs, and gone home to dry boots and warm hearths along South Lane and the market square—leaving two rotating watch-crews of four men apiece to walk the subterranean duckboards with lanterns and check the trash-screens at the bakehouse weir and the Low Sike flume.
Back in the main taproom of the River Lantern Inn, only a single drift-wood log burned low on the hearth dogs, casting a quiet ruddy glow across the scrubbed oak tables and the heavy iron-bound Town Ledger resting open on its lectern at the end of the bar.
Jon stood behind the oak counter with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, slowly flexing his right hand in the warm light of Sister Oda’s horn lantern while Oda and Lady Signe Lorr completed the formal evening audit of the house registers.
Every time Jon closed his fist and opened it again, his eyes went to the bare, sun-browned skin of his right index finger.
For eleven lifetimes he had grown so accustomed to the tight, unyielding collar of white scar tissue around all ten of his digits that he had forgotten what it felt like to bend a knuckle without pushing against an invisible ring of bone-cold wire. Now his right index finger moved with effortless, warm freedom, making the remaining nine finger-rings across his two hands stand out…
