The drop of blood on Sir Cael Ardent’s neck did not fall.
It clung to the cold hollow beside his windpipe, shivering with every ragged, gasping breath he drew, dark as a crushed elderberry against his chalk-white skin. The triangular tip of the hunting dagger was sunk a sixteenth of an inch into his flesh, held there with the rigid, white-knuckled pressure of a man who was fighting his own hand to keep from driving the steel through his throat.
Above them, the rain fell in a steady, freezing drizzle, hissing as it struck the glowing cherry-red ring of the Returner seal beneath Cael’s tunic.
Outside the iron pickets of the courtyard, forty yards away, thirty Charter watchmen stood frozen in the mud. Bowstrings remained drawn, but nobody moved. Nobody shouted. The silence that hung over the bridge of St. Jude was so brittle, so complete, that the only sound in the river valley was the low, steady churn of the weir three hundred paces downstream.
Cael’s chest heaved. His bloodshot eyes were wild, unmoored from reality, darting between the stone flags at his feet and Jon Hale’s face.
“Dismantle the room, Jon,” Cael whispered, his voice rising from a rasp into an agonizing, shrill hiss. “Order your men to open the kitchen door. Take that pewter bowl from the shelf, smash it with an iron hammer on the tavern stones, and throw the pieces into the river. If you do not burn the Common Charter before the clock strikes…
