Elin Hale had spent eight years boiling linen rags, scraping gangrene from split shinbones, and sewing severed earlobes back onto the skulls of drunken drovers. She knew the exact smell of a wound that would heal and the sour, sweetish stench of a wound that would turn to black rot within forty-eight hours. She knew how much blood a grown carter could spill on a pine table before his eyes rolled back, and she knew that a child with grey lips and a sunken fontanelle had less than six hours to live unless someone forced sweet water between its teeth.
She did not care about the King’s Commission. She did not care about the grand defense of the Northern Marches. To Elin, an officer with a fluted cuirass and a white surcoat was merely another man who created work for women with wooden buckets and bone needles.
When Sir Cael Ardent walked into the bakehouse scullery at mid-afternoon, his boots tracking dried road dust across her freshly scrubbed slate flags, Elin did not drop her iron spoon.
She was standing over the three-legged brazier, skimming the grey scum from a thirty-quart copper cauldron of barley gruel. Her apron was soaked across the bib with cider vinegar, her grey sleeves pinned up to her elbows, and her dark hair pulled back in a severe, functional knot held fast by two wooden skewers.
