The cut beneath Elin Hale’s jaw was stiffening into a narrow, dark ridge by the time the fourth bell began its muffled toll from the tower of St. Jude. The sting was dull, like a bramble scratch earned while picking blackberries along the ditch bank, but every time she swallowed, the dry pull of the skin reminded her of the cold iron edge that had rested against her throat.
She did not touch it again. Touching an open scratch invited the fester, and in the border camps behind the redoubts, she had seen men die of lockjaw from an unwashed thumbnail. A clean scab was nature’s bandage; grease and idle fingers only turned honest blood into sour yellow corruption.
She stood near the bread oven, her back straight, her hands resting against the coarse wool of her apron. On the far side of the scrubbed prep table, Sir Cael Ardent remained perched on the edge of the low oak bench. The golden hero of the Three Bridges looked less like a figure carved on a cathedral tomb and more like a deserter cornered in a wagon shed.
Elin had spent two years in the field infirmaries of the King’s Border Guard before Jon had brought her down to Harth. She knew the posture of a soldier who had been too long without sleep. She knew the dry, gray crust that formed at the corners of a man’s mouth when his canteen had run empty on a forced march, and she…
