For thirty years Sister Oda had spent her mornings in the damp stone vestry of the St. Jude bridge shrine, scraping river-mold from parish death rolls and examining the worn brass tokens left behind by drowned barge-haulers and border soldiers. Her eyes were trained to read what powerful men tried to chisel off the stone. She knew the difference between an original mason’s mark cut into wet lime with a flat drove and a royal surcharge hammered over top of it three centuries later with a cold steel punch.
Kneeling beside the pine trestle in the smoke-thick back parlor of the River Lantern Inn, her gaunt fingers still wedged beneath the vellum edge of the Bound Common Charter against the frost-rimed flank of the stone bowl, Oda watched the last fragments of the Crown’s crimson objection dissolve into the gray marsh salt.
On the pallet beside her elbow, Sir Cael Ardent had stopped thrashing. With the red systemic whip-cord broken, the maimed knight lay limp and shivering beneath Elin Hale’s compressing hands, his chest rising in shallow, uneven mortal breaths while the linen pad over his breastbone slowly darkened with ordinary venous blood. He was no longer a golden vessel wired to a subterranean furnace; he was simply a gravely injured twenty-nine-year-old man who smelled of scorched wool, sour sweat, and willow-bark tea.
