The salt cask under Cael’s right heel smelled of brine and herring heads, but it kept the splintered thigh bone from shifting when the cellar floor trembled under the distant siege engines.
Jon Hale sat across the scarred oak trestle, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, watching the yellow flame of a single tallow candle gutter in the damp draft from the sub-flue. Between them lay the physical record of their twelve lives: two sheets of heavy calfskin vellum ruled in black iron-gall ink, a small brass ink-horn with an ox-bone stylus, and three linen-wrapped jars of consecrated salt from Sister Oda’s hospice cupboard.
On his right hand, Jon’s white scars felt cold and numb. On his forearm, the four white bands—Signe’s stylus, Bram’s iron brace, Tobin’s message tube, and the bound Common Charter—sat like rings of pale chalk against his sun-darkened skin.
Cael leaned back against the rough limestone masonry of the cellar wall, his face the color of wood ash. His right leg was immobilized in three heavy splints of ash timber bound with hemp cord, but even with the bandages tight, a dark spot of seepage the size of a copper coin had begun to bleed through the clean linen at his groin. His linen shirt hung open, exposing his chest. The golden seal embedded over his sternum was no longer blazing; it gave off a fitful, feverish amber glimmer that cast nervous shadows across his ribs, pulsing with the weak, irregular rhythm of his blood.
