Elin Hale looked across the ledger desk at Marta and Dunstan Harl, feeling the familiar, steady quiet that always settled into her hands when the waiting stopped and the triage began.
During the border wars ten years ago, before she had ever married Jon or hung her herb-drying racks in the River Lantern’s scullery, Elin had run the receiving tent at the Red Ford field hospital. When thirty wagons of wounded timber-cutters and militia footmen rolled in through the mud at dusk, a nurse who tried to carry all thirty stretchers at once broke her own back before midnight. You saved the ward by setting up a clean table, lighting two steady lamps, and numbering the beds in order so every orderly, carter, and water-carrier knew their station.
The fifty numbered lines she had ruled down the foolscap Shareholder Roll were her receiving beds for Harth.
“No hungry child turned away while a Harl loaf sits on the board,” Elin repeated clearly, her goose quill moving across Line 01 of the Shareholder Roll and the matching margin of the town compact in a clean, upright hand that thirty years of rain would not blur. “I have written the food stipulation directly into the first covenant, Dunstan. Give me the full household roll for your share.”
