Fen’s hand did not shake as he unrolled the brittle charcoal roster. He held the blackened calfskin between his thumb and forefinger, his coarse wool sleeves pushed back to reveal the pale scars on his forearms from years of stitching farm hands torn by scythes and mending broken bones in the lower valley clinic. He stood between Sergeant Berr and Corporal Baird, his warm, living breath condensing in faint, pale plumes in the damp chill of the amphitheater, while on either side of him the dead stood motionless, their calcined ribs grey and silent under the flickering lantern light.
I looked at Fen from my locked place within the granite clamps. For months I had known him only as the quiet man with the vinegar bottle and the clean linen bandages who tended the wounded in the fort cellar without asking which side had paid their enlistment bounty. But there was an older, deeper shadow behind his eyes today. His own brother, Dael, had marched north with the Third Border Regiment thirty winters ago, carrying a canvas kit-bag, an extra pair of greased stockings, and a brass fife he had carved from an old powder flask. Dael had never sent a letter home after the snow closed the high pass, and when the spring thaw came, the parish priest had simply written Lost in the Hills across the margin of the communion book.
