When Jon Hale walked back through the street door of the River Lantern twenty minutes after leaving the fish shambles, his hands were caked to the knuckles with black wharf-silt and green river-moss, and his face was so pale beneath the soot of the west wall that Elin stopped halfway across the taproom with a kettle of hot water in her hand.
“Jon?” Elin said, her triage nurse’s eyes dropping immediately to his ribs and forearms to look for a crossbow bolt or a knife-slash. “Did Morvath show himself by the culverts?”
“Not Morvath,” Jon said. His voice sounded hollow to his own ears, like a cask tapped after the beer has leaked out through a dry stave. He set his horn lantern down on the walnut bar and reached into his apron pocket to lay a four-inch splinter of rotted heart-oak, stained blue-black with iron hinge-rust, onto the clean wood beside the Bound Town Ledger. “Where is Corve Penner? And tell Lady Signe and Joran Finch to come out to the bar.”
Notary Corve Penner, who had been dozing on a flour sack near the kitchen door with his soot-stained velvet cuffs wrapped around his knees after two hours on the west-wall bucket ladder, scrambled to his feet and adjusted his brass spectacles on his nose. From the kitchen table, Lady Signe Lorr and Joran Finch stepped into the taproom, while Sister Oda leaned forward from her chair by the doorway.
