The boy’s name was Marn, and he was seventeen years old—two winters younger than Fen’s brother Dael had been when the Third Border Regiment marched south under sealed orders and never sent back so much as a brass coat button.
All the way up the steep, sleet-slick switchbacks from the outer picket ditch, Fen had heard the crunch of that artillery caisson wheel inside his own ears.
At half past three in the morning, while the rest of the hill fort was gathered around the hearth reading Cale’s stolen ledger sheets against the hum from the Survey House basement, Fen had walked down to the boundary stones with his white healer’s armband tied over his wool sleeve. A sentry from the fourth siege battery had whistled him in under a hooded tin lantern. One of Captain Arda Dorn’s corporal-chirurgeons was waiting by the culvert ditch with a pair of bloody shears in his fist and three privates holding down a baggage carter on an upturned ammunition tarpaulin.
An eight-pounder field gun had skidded sideways in the frozen ruts while the night crew was shifting the battery stakes twenty yards back from the trench line. Before the teamster could jump clear of the trace chains, the iron-shod rim of the rear caisson wheel—sixteen hundredweight of seasoned oak and forged tire-iron—had dropped off a frost-heaved stone and rolled squarely across the boy’s left instep.
