At the sound of his daughter’s quiet refusal, the suffocating vision of the frozen five-day sanctuary shattered inside Jon Hale’s mind like thin puddle-ice beneath a carter’s boot.
The air in the back parlor rushed back into his lungs—hot, acrid with the smell of charred wool, vinegar, wet sheep’s fleece, and boiling lime rising from the cellar shaft. On the bottom step of the threshold, Nell stood watching him with her chin lifted and her hands folded steadily around Button’s feathered breast, trusting her father not to build a prison out of his fear for her life. Beside the pallet, Elin reached out with her free left hand and laid her fingers—rough with lye soap and stained with willow bark—directly over the back of Jon’s scarred right wrist, where the Witness Vow and the Non-Execution Covenant met.
“She gave you her answer, Jon,” Elin said softly, her eyes meeting his across the narrow bed. “We did not fight through thirteen lives to lock our child in a cellar box. Let the day move forward.”
Jon looked down into the frost-rimed stone-and-pewter bowl beneath his palms.
Resting against the packed gray marsh salt on the outer rim was the crinkled, grease-spotted square of parchment from Object #4—the first room bill of the River Lantern Inn, written in Jon’s own cramped tradesman’s hand and counter-signed by Sir Cael Ardent on the evening before the loops began: Received of Sir Cael Ardent, one copper piece, for the keeping of one iron-bound stone box…
