Jon Hale leaned over the head of the maple kneading table so that his face was directly in the line of sight below the hanging bull’s-eye lantern. He dipped a corner of clean linen into the bowl of cool well water beside Sister Oda’s suture tray and wiped the cold sweat and grey aqueduct soot from Sir Cael Ardent’s forehead and eyelids.
“Cael,” Jon said, his voice pitched in the plain, unhurried register he used when waking a tired teamster in the taproom settle before the morning wagon run. “Cael, open your eyes and look at me.”
On the scrubbed wood, Cael Ardent’s breath hitched twice. His surviving left hand twitched beneath the wool blanket, his three working fingers flexing by habit as if searching for the wire-wrapped grip of his broadsword or the golden rim of the Returner Seal on his chest. Finding neither, his grey eyes snapped wide open in the bright yellow lamplight.
For three seconds the twenty-nine-year-old knight stared straight up at the smoke-darkened rafters of the bakehouse roof, his pupils dilated and his chest heaving as his mind scrambled for the familiar systemic overlay that had governed his waking moments across twelve resets atop the five-hundred-year-old Crown Furnace. He blinked once, twice, trying to summon the gold status lines that should have told him the hour of the day, the percentage of his somatic attunement, and the distance to the cellar anchor.
