Two miles north of the town walls, where the river bent sharply beneath the forested shoulder of the western bluffs, the world belonged to darkness and water. The rain had settled into a fine, freezing mist that clung to the black branches of the river willows like spider silk. The air smelled of wet slate, dead alder leaves, and the deep, cold mud of the river shoals.
Jon Hale stood knee-deep in a tangle of wild blackberry canes and river sedge, wielding a heavy curved billhook. The steel blade, ground sharp on an oilstone an hour before midnight, sliced through the fibrous willow shoots with a dull, wet chop. With each stroke, he dragged the severed branches behind him, tossing them into the brushwood berm that blocked the path from the high road.
Five paces ahead of him, working with the steady, mechanical rhythm of a timber saw, was Alden Bram.
The master mason wore a sleeveless leather jerkin over a gray woolen smock, his thick forearms caked with red river clay up to the elbows. Despite his sixty-four years and the bad shoulder that clicked rhythmically in its socket with every downward swing, Bram swung his two-handed hedging bill with effortless, brutal economy. He did not hack at the roots; he severed the thick stems at an angle with a single sliding cut, clearing a four-foot swath of bank with three strokes of the blade.
