Elin Hale did not raise her voice the way Captain Dain did on the parade cobbles, nor did she use the formal court cadences of Lady Signe Lorr. She set her willow-woven triage basket down beside the herring barrel on the market cross steps, rested one chapped hand on the handle of her boiled-vinegar jug, and looked directly at the women standing in the second row of shareholders—Marta Harl with flour still dusting her woolen shawl, Widow Clara Moss, and tall Briony Kell from the cartwright’s yard.
“Six years ago at the Red Ford field hospital, before the border truce broke, I washed coal-scald off forty teamsters’ wives who had been told to camp in a dry lime-kiln gully behind the royal siege lines,” Elin said, her clear, steady voice cutting through the river chill. “The generals knew the gully sat down-wind of the sulfur trenches. They didn’t warn the baggage carts because moving forty ox-wains takes three hours of road time, and three hours of road time costs a battery its morning firing window. Marshal Ors is running that same arithmetic two miles west of us right now.”
At the back of the square, Garrick Holt shifted his weight from one boot to the other, his blackened fingers tightening on the ash helve of his smith’s hammer. “Nobody here is defending Ors’s arithmetic, Mistress Hale. What I’m asking is why we should put six pairs of able boots back into his lines with a full belly of Dunstan’s rye…
