The gravel beneath Jon Hale’s knees was cold enough to bite through wool.
He did not rise. He set the heavy, brass-bound volume of the Town Ledger upon a dry slab of limestone at the edge of the gutter, dropped his hands into the grey river silt, and began to dig.
His calloused fingers clawed through three inches of packed sand and crushed gravel. He knew this soil. In his second year as an innkeeper, when Dunstan Harl had rebuilt the bakehouse chimney with lime mortar and red clay bricks, Jon had helped the baker haul two cartloads of foundation stones from the south quarry. They had set the base of the great baking oven six feet deep into the river terrace, laying down five massive granite slabs each weighing half a ton to carry the weight of thirty tons of brick and hot ash. You could not remove those stones with a team of twenty oxen. If an earthquake shook Harth to pieces, those granite sills would remain anchored in the clay until the river dried into dust.
Jon dug until the skin beneath his fingernails split, weeping thin lines of dark blood into the mud.
He found only smooth, water-rounded river pebbles. Small stones, cold and slick with greenish algae, packed tightly into yellow silt that had lain undisturbed since the valley was a marsh. There were no chiseled edges. No traces of grey lime mortar. No soot. No charcoal crumbs from forty years of burning split birch…
