The warmth of the River Lantern taproom hit Iven like a blow across the mouth.
It smelled of toasted malt, wet oak planking, and the faint, sweet grease of mutton suet—civilian smells that belonged to an order of life she had not inhabited since Marshal Ors’s conscription sergeants burned her father’s cart shed on the south border six winters past. For three years, her world had smelled exclusively of wet wool, sulfurous heat-chalk, camp lye, and the bitter vinegar sappers used to cool smoking ballista axles.
She sat on a low, three-legged stool before the lime-washed hearth, her bare heels resting on the warm flagstones. Jon Hale had cut away the blood-stiffened left sleeve of her coat with his border knife, washing the shredded flesh of her shoulder with warm river water and a stinging wash of wild comfrey. A clean linen compress was bound tightly across the muscle with strips of bleached sailcloth, throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache that matched her pulse.
Between her cold hands she held a turned maple bowl filled with steaming barley water. She drank in small, cautious sips, letting the coarse grain heat her throat while her dark, sunken eyes mapped the room.
