Inside the stone-walled wash house at the rear of the River Lantern courtyard, the air was so thick with scalding steam that the limewashed ceiling joists dripped warm pearls of condensation stained pale red-gold with boiled willow bark.
Elin Hale stood before the brick-set forty-gallon copper laundry boiler with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, her linen apron pinned double across her chest, and a pair of three-foot ash laundry-tongs gripped in her reddened hands.
In the boiling vat before her, twenty yards of bleached linen sheeting—torn into four-inch and six-inch roller bandages along the straight grain so the edges would never fray inside a wound—tumbled slowly through a bubbling broth of clean well-water, coarse curing-salt, and stripped white-willow inner bark.
Seven years before she had married Jon Hale and hung herbs in a river tavern kitchen, Elin had spent four winters as a senior ward-sister in the royal border infirmary at Stoneford Gap. She knew what iron arrow-heads, splintered oak palisade stakes, and black-powder burns did to human flesh when a siege hit a river town. And more than that, because Jon had sat with her at the kitchen table last night and unlocked the whole eight-week ledger of his ten scarred fingers into her hands, she knew how the previous seven sieges of Harth had ended for the wounded.
