Jon and young Tobin got Cael up out of the Low Sike mud before the carpenter crew had even finished pitching the seam of the third box-flume.
“Take my left shoulder, Tobin,” Jon ordered quietly, keeping his own right arm hooked firm around Cael’s waist while the boy braced the knight’s left elbow. “Walk him straight back up the lane into the River Lantern cellar and do not stop at the cross. Tell Elin to pack fresh ice and willow-bark around the collar before the skin sloughs.”
Cael’s boots dragged heavily for the first ten paces up the cobblestones, his right arm hanging numb and useless inside his cloak sleeve where he had wedged the bone between the stone jamb and the four-hundred-pound flume beam. Yet as he looked back over his shoulder into the muddy trench beneath the fish market—where Joran Finch and Bessa Karr were already hoisting the fourth and final pine trough into place against the base of Old Hill—a grim, blood-streaked ghost of a smile touched the corner of the knight’s mouth.
“The beam stayed level, Hale,” Cael rasped, spitting a thread of blood onto the wet cobbles. “The box told my hand to drop it on Finch’s head, and the beam stayed level.”
