The side wicket of the guild-hall creaked inward, admitting a draft of cold river air and six men who looked as though they had been shaped directly from the damp loam of the valley floor. They wore homespun frieze coats caked with clay at the hems, heavy sheepskin gaiters tied with willow thongs, and broad-brimmed felt hats that they pulled from their heads as they stepped onto the ash-strewn flagstones.
They were tenant farmers from the South Sike—men who held no guild charters and owned no stone houses within the walls, but who leased the forty-acre hay meadows and rye fields that lay between the town ditch and the southern willow marshes. Their hands were dark and thick, creased with decades of manure and river silt, their knuckles knobby as gnarled apple twigs.
At their head stood Old Kester, a man with sixty-five winters of river floods in his bent spine, his white hair fringe framing a face as weathered and gray as unpainted barn siding.
“We saw the masons hauling trench-spikes toward the weir,” Kester said, his voice slow, gravelly, carrying the flat cadence of the bottomlands. He did not look at Sir Cael’s blued plate, nor at Lady Signe’s velvet coif; he looked at Jon Hale and Dunstan Harl, men whose scales he had watched weigh grain on market mornings. “The word in the ditch is that the town council is going to pull the sluice pins. The word is that our winter rye is going under the…
