The turn off Fish Street into South Lane had always been a narrow, shoulder-pinching bottleneck.
For forty winters, as long as Jon Hale had walked the river wards of Harth, every carter hauling grain from the south valley had cursed that corner. The eaves of Master Dunstan Harl’s two-story timber bakehouse projected four feet over the ditch, their cedar shakes green with river moss, casting the lane into perpetual damp shadow. An ox cart loaded with salted herring could barely squeeze between Harl’s heavy stone mounting block and the churchyard wall of St. Jude without scraping the hubs against the masonry. At the sixth bell, the air there was always thick, warm, and rich—the dark, comforting fragrance of crushed caraway seed, hot rye crusts, and birch-log embers blowing straight from the brick flue into the cold street.
Jon turned the corner past the shrine’s limestone buttress.
The air that met his face was thin, cold, and flat. It carried no warmth. It smelled only of wet lime, crushed river gravel, and rotting alder leaves.
Jon stopped dead.
The lane was not narrow. It was thirty feet wide.
Where the heavy timber threshold of the bakery had sat upon its dressed river-granite footings, where the two-story flour loft had leaned over the ditch with its hanging hoist beam and canvas sacks, there was only a wide, barren expanse of gray silt. The ground was level, packed hard by rainwater and scored with shallow, grass-grown wagon ruts that looked decades old. A…
