The runners of the timber hand-sled scraped across the threshold flagstones with a wet, gravelly shriek.
Garr and Pell came through the gate arch first, their canvas shoulders steaming in the cold hall air. Between them, balanced on the narrow ash bed under a mound of coarse coal sacks, lay thirty-two-year-old Renn. The miner was shivering so violently that his teeth clicked against each other like dice in a leather cup, his face smeared with black coal dust and the white grease of cold sweat.
“Gently,” Fen said, hurrying forward with a folded wool blanket over his arm. “Bring the sled right up to the hearth apron. Don’t lift him by the ankles—set the bed on the floor.”
Noll watched through the mortar seams of the chimney breast. The warmth of the fuel-less hearth rolled outward across the flagstones, meeting the raw valley draft that had followed the sled inside.
Tessa followed the sled through the arch, her canvas apron soaked with ditch water and her hands grey with slack mud. She moved straight to the pine worktable, unhooked her water skin, and set Fen’s iron basin beside the fire.
“He crawled three hundred yards through the culvert,” Tessa said, her voice tight with anger. “The ice in the ditch was an inch thick over the mud. If Garr hadn’t pulled the willow roots clear, he would have drowned in eighteen inches of slack wash.”
