Before returning to the River Lantern Inn for the evening watch, Jon left Alden Bram and Dunstan Harl at the Cross Lane corner and walked three hundred paces south along the reed-choked river embankment toward the Low Sike marsh ford.
Here, below the southern palisade of Harth, the river widened into a half-mile crescent of stagnant slackwater channels, black peat-hummocks, and waist-high grey sedge known as the Low Sike. In peaceful autumns, only eel-trappers and reed-cutters poled flat-bottomed punts through the channels. In war, however, a submerged ridge of glacial gravel ran three feet below the brown bog-water from the east bank to the south postern meadow—a hidden natural causeway wide enough for four abreast infantry or light cavalry to wade across in the dark if they knew the stakes.
Across the first seven loops of the siege, Marshal Ors had found that submerged gravel causeway on the night of Day 2 without losing a single scout to the peat-holes.
It had taken Jon until the sixth life to discover how the Ash Host’s outriders mapped a sunken marsh path through pitch-black river fog: they did not use human waders with sounding-poles. Instead, Ors’s marsh-handlers released scores of pale, yard-long blind bog-eels—bred in the salt-barren inland fens of the north—into the upper slackwater at dusk. Drawn down-current by the warm trace of livestock run-off and human sewage seeping from the south town ditch, the eels swam along the shallowest gravel shelf where the warm town drainage stayed near the surface…
