The clinic room smelled of boiled vinegar, damp fleece, and the bitter tang of crushed burdock leaves.
Fen knelt on the flagstones beside the low bench, his sleeves rolled past his elbows, cutting away Soldier Joss’s left boot with a blunt-nosed leather knife. The stiff regulation hide had shrunk in the ditch-water, clamping around the soldier’s swollen ankle like a cooper’s iron hoop. When the blade parted the final seam over the instep, Joss suckled in a sharp breath through his clenched teeth and grabbed the edge of the wooden pallet.
“Steady, lad,” Fen said quietly. He dipped a clean linen cloth into a basin of warm water and willow-bark tea. “The bone isn’t broken, but the tendon is stretched like an overwound bowstring. If you try to run on that foot by morning, you won’t make three miles before the leg folds under you.”
“I don’t need to make three miles, healer,” Joss whispered, his knuckles white where he gripped the bench. “I only need to make four hundred paces back to the mine picket before the third relief lantern goes out. If Sergeant Gault finds my straw pallet empty at roll-call, the provost writes down desertion in the margin. And under the Warden’s commission, desertion in a declared siege carries a hemp collar from the nearest apple tree.”
