The iron key turned in the copper padlock with a dry, reluctant scrape.
Jon stood in the rear alcove of the lower cellar vault, behind the cedar chocks where the October ale tuns rested. This recess had no window, no air grate, and no direct line to the damp foundation drains that emptied into the river. It was an interior buttress of dressed river stone, four feet thick, mortared with lime and cattle hair during the reign of the third king. Here, on a shelf carved from cured chestnut timber, rested the inn’s true ledger.
It was not the public book kept beneath the bar counter to satisfy imperial excise officers. This volume was bound in thick, smoke-stained bull-hide, stitched with waxed hemp cord that had blackened with decades of cellar soot. Its corners were capped with beaten iron plates to keep out the cellar mice.
Jon lifted the book from the shelf. The leather felt cold and heavy in his hands, dense with the physical continuity of seven lifetimes. As his fingers closed around the spine, the pale band around his left index finger—the tanned hide ring earned at the fourth return—thrummed with a faint, prickling warmth against his knuckles.
