The valley drums ceased their thunder just as the sun touched the ragged black spruce along the western bluffs.
For twelve hours, the heavy, rhythmic beat of the bull-hide drumheads had rolled down the limestone valley, shaking the soot from the tavern chimneys and vibrating in the teeth of every tradesman in Harth. The Ash Host had held their columns at the edge of the gray willow flats throughout the cold day, deploying their picket lines, testing the range of Captain Dain’s parapet archers, and hauling their wicker siege mantlets into the gullies. Now, with the dying light turning the swollen river to the color of tarnished pewter, the drumming died away into the evening mist.
The silence that followed was not peaceful. It had the heavy, suffocating quality of a mine shaft after a roof fall, broken only by the cold, steady murmur of the river current lapping against the granite pilings of the North Quay.
Jon Hale stood in the shadowed recess of the kitchen doorway, leaning his shoulder against the cured oak frame.
The air in the courtyard was sharp with the first frost of Flood Month, smelling of woodsmoke, wet slate, and the sweet, yeasty aroma of fresh barley loaves cooling on the scullery shelves. Inside the scullery, Elin had already salted down the night haul—those sixteen fat silver eels taken from the upper basket at the weir before dawn—to stretch the town watch’s rations. But throughout the long afternoon, the kitchen talk had returned to…
