While Jon, Alden Bram, and Garrick Holt were lashing the last turns of wire onto the intake wheel in the scorching breach at the bottom of the hill, Elin Hale was walking beneath the floorboards of South Lane with a twenty-gallon copper soup-kettle slung between two ash carrying-poles.
She had been on her feet since midnight—four hours kneeling on the cold cellar flags beside Cael Ardent with willow-bark poultices, three hours organizing the morning porridge and the household clearing-crews around the market cross, and the whole afternoon boiling down three salt-mutton shoulders, a sack of pearl barley, and four strings of winter onions in the River Lantern’s great kitchen copper.
Yet as she stepped carefully through the shored three-foot masonry breach between Cellar Eight and Cellar Nine—holding the front ends of the ash carrying-poles in her calloused hands while Widow Clara Moss steadied the rear poles and eight-year-old Nell walked ahead with a tin candle-lantern—Elin’s back was as straight and her step as unhurried as if she were crossing her own taproom floor.
Twelve years ago, before she had married Jon Hale and hung her nursing shears on the buttery peg, Elin had spent three winters with the border field-ambulances along the high passes. She knew what men and women looked like after ten hours of swinging twenty-pound sledges in lime dust and freezing marsh clay. When a digging crew hit the tenth hour without hot salt and fat in their bellies, their hands began to shake on the steel…
