The stone was colder than river ice, and the first thing Fen felt was his own pulse beating against the carved grooves.
Then the cold ran backward up his wrist and settled at the roots of his back teeth.
Above him on the lip of the mud trench, Sergeant Berr’s bleached fingers closed on the wool of Fen’s shoulder, ready to wrench him up onto the grass. The sergeant’s grip stopped midway. The dry rattle of mail links beneath the canvas tarp died out. Across the pit, Tessa Dene froze with her muddy hands still wrapped around the ash shaft of her spade, and Sella Rusk’s head came up as sharply as a deer catching wind off a burn.
No bronze clang rolled out across the hilltop. A sparrow perched on the elderberry scrub by the broken east curtain wall did not even hop from its twig.
Yet the courtyard and the vaulted hall behind them were suddenly full of people speaking.
Fen knew the difference between a noise in the air and an ache in the bone. Two winters back, when a timber-sled had jumped the iced skid-way above Mere and pinned young Corin’s forearm against a hemlock stump, Fen had held the boy’s wrist while the parish barber set the split radius. When the broken bone-ends ground together into place, no sound had crossed the room, yet Fen had felt the grating jar travel straight through his own palms, up his elbows, and into the hinge of his…
