Half a mile east of the charred remains of the manifest cart. There, the gravel river highway rose toward a dry limestone bluff, Ilyra raised her left hand and halted the four surviving wagons beside an ancient, moss-grown boundary stone.
To the north and east, the main country road continued along the high, firm ground above the valley. Ideal terrain for twelve mounted raiders to regroup, fetch fresh arrows and pitch-pots, and ride the slow mule-carts down before nightfall. To the south, however, a narrow track of crushed white river-shells and sunken willow fascines branched off the highway. He dropped between eight-foot walls of brown winter sedge into the tideless lowland reed marshes.
“We leave the high road here,” Ilyra told Pel. She pointed the tip of her ashwood spear down the white shell-marl track. “A warhorse weighs eleven hundred pounds with a rider in iron. Off the raised stone road crown, that grey silt will swallow a cavalry mount to the belly in three strides. If our friend with the cut cuff wants another pass at the third wagon before we reach the lowland villages, he will have to leave his horses on the bluff and come down the dike on his own two boots.”
Custodian Halen, sitting huddled on the footboard of the lead barley cart with his bruised right wrist tucked into his mud-stained sash, looked down at the miles of silent, mist-wreathed water channels and shivered. “Those marsh dikes are barely wide enough for a single axle, Commander! If a wheel slips off the willow mats into the peat, even four mules won’t pull it out.”
“Then the drivers will watch their wheels. You’ll walk behind the tailboard to lighten the springs,” Ilyra said coldly. She didn’t wait for the Court official to protest. She tapped the flank of the lead mule with the butt of her spear. Pel clucked the team off the gravel crown onto the crunching white shell-marl of the marsh track.
Seyun walked behind the third wagon so he could keep one hand near the wet marsh-wort sack baffling the three copper needles. He felt the forty-pound bundle of river-dredged marsh iron inside his canvas pack settle deeper against his spine with every downward stride.
On flat gravel, forty pounds of dead metal was an insistent tug on the collarbones. On the spongy, uneven willow-bundle causeways of the lowland marsh, where every step needed balancing across slick oyster shells and damp clay ruts, the iron bars seemed to possess a stubborn gravity of their own. His boot heel sank half an inch into the soft marl margin. Each time, the dense weight on his back tried to pull his shoulders sideways toward the dark, slow-moving silt channels on either side.
Yet as the first mile of the marsh swallowed the caravan between rustling walls of tall Phragmites reeds, Seyun didn’t loosen his pack straps or shift the iron onto the third wagon’s tailboard for a single step. Instead, he used the rhythmic downward pressure of the forty pounds to anchor his breathing.
Four counts in through the nose, drawing the cool, damp smell of peat-water and crushed river shells down into his lungs. Four counts around the scarred spirit vein pathways of his ribs. That let his internal Coal warmth spread across the strained upper back muscle muscles under his pack straps. Four counts out. Because Coal breath couldn’t leave the skin, every ounce of weight his body bore had to be answered by bone posture and steady blood flow.
Ahead of him, young Tomas walked beside the left front wheel of the third wagon with an ash pole in his hands, sounding the underwater edges of the willow fascines wherever salty water lapped over the track. At the rear of the carriage, veteran driver Pel guided the two surviving draft mules with short, quiet whistles. That kept the broad iron tires centered to the half-inch along the white shell crown.
Even the two leftover guard post pike-guards—sober and silent now that they had seen the Second Board’s own brass tally cut from the ambusher’s sleeve—walked with their pikes leveled over the sedge margins. They jumped at every splash of a marsh heron or muskrat in the reeds.
Inside the bronze-inlaid cedar crate, the young fire spirit remained remarkably calm. The damp chill rising off the surrounding silt channels and the steady evaporation of water from the marsh-wort sack over the three copper needles kept the outer wood cool to the touch. Its rhythmic double-beat pulse sounded no louder than a sleeping hound behind a wainscot.
For two hours the column wound deeper into the maze of tideless channels, crossing three narrow log water gates where Pel and the wagonwrights had to lay down spare oak planks by hand to bridge rotted timbers.
At each halt, while Corren and Jarn shifted the heavy planks under the iron tires, Ilyra stood on the raised stone road margin with her bandaged right shoulder held level and her pale eyes scanning the high limestone bluffs two miles to the north. Twice she glanced back at Seyun as he knelt in the crushed shells to check the lashings on the plank-bridges with the forty-pound pack still strapped squarely to his back, and twice she looked away without comment. He noticed she never once offered to take the weight off his shoulders. Even so, honoring the exact terms she had set on the road.
An hour before sunset, when the low gray sky began to turn the color of tarnished pewter and cold mist rose from the black peat-water between the sedge banks, Pel pointed his whip handle toward a low, flat-topped rise thirty yards ahead where a stand of stunted marsh-alders grew out of white shell shingle.
“Second Dredger’s Island, Commander,” the old wagon driver called out quietly. “The river-court guards built it up fifty years back out of dredged oyster shells and quarry stone when they cut the peat canals. High and dry above the spring flood, sixty paces wide across the crown, and only one three-foot raised stone road neck leading onto it from the west and one from the east.”
Ilyra walked ahead along the narrow raised stone road neck. She tested the firmness of the packed white shells with the iron butt-shoe of her spear before examining the clearing beyond. The island stood four feet above the surrounding silt flats. A broad oval of hard, bleached oyster shells and short salt-grass ringed on all sides by twenty yards of bottomless black reed-mud and waist-deep salty channels.
In the center of the island stood the roofless stone walls of an old peat-cutter’s drying shed, together with half a dozen weathered cedar drying-poles and a stack of abandoned wicker reed-baskets left behind from the autumn harvest.
“Bring the wagons up and wheel them into a crescent facing the western neck,” Ilyra ordered. She stepped back to let the lead mule team pass. “Keep the fire-spirit wagon in the center behind the barley carts, and don’t light a dry-wood fire that shows flame above the stone shed walls. We boil water with char-coal in the ditch hollow only.”
One by one, the four heavy wagons rumbled across the narrow three-foot neck of packed shell-marl and swung into position around the outer edge of the island. Their oak beds formed a solid wooden stockade above the surrounding mud flats. Only when the last trace-chain was unhooked and the mules were tethered to the stunted alders did Seyun finally unbuckle his leather pack straps and lower the forty-pound bundle of marsh iron onto the crushed shells beside the third wagon’s wheel.
The weight left his back. Then, his spine seemed to float upward half an inch of its own accord, his shirt soaked through with sweat despite the cold marsh twilight.
Beside him, young Tomas let out a long breath. He rubbed his mud-caked shins as he looked back down the narrow white ribbon of the western raised stone road disappearing into the gathering mist. “No horse is coming down that ribbon in the dark without breaking both front legs, Master Clerk,” the boy said, his voice half-relieved and half-awed by the vast, rustling emptiness of the marsh. “We could hear a man wading through that sedge from three hundred paces off.”
“We could,” Seyun agreed quietly. He wiped his blistered palms on his knees as he looked at the single three-foot-wide ribbon of white shell-marl connecting their island to the dark reeds. “Which means if they come tonight or tomorrow night, Tomas, they won’t try to wade the mud. They’ll come straight down that three-foot neck where a spear has nowhere to step aside.”
Across the clearing, standing beside the low stone wall of the roofless shed, Ilyra was already untying the grey oilcloth around the forty-pound bundle of marsh iron.