The northern dike sluice stood three hundred yards beyond the inner market square, where the old earthwork rampart met the timber flood-weir that held back the swollen waters of the upper river. A raw wind blew down from the high shale bluffs, driving needles of sleet sideways across the flooded lower rye pastures that Alden Bram had inundated the morning before. Across two hundred acres of drowned stubble, black willow tops and the fence-posts of sacrificed farm plots poked above the choppy grey sheet of water, forcing any heavy siege engine onto the narrow, stony spine of the west ridge.
Inside the timber guard-shelter at the dike head, Elin Hale knelt on an upturned nail keg to finish dressing the last of the six captives’ wounds—a deep reed-slice across the Achilles tendon of a twenty-year-old spade-man from the south fen. She spread a thick smear of rendered mutton tallow mixed with crushed yarrow over a clean linen pad, bound it snug with a figure-eight turn around the ankle bone, and tied off the ends with a surgeon’s flat knot that would not chafe inside a wet boot.
“Don’t pull that wrapping off to scratch at the yarrow when your skin warms up,” Elin told the young sapper, tapping his knee with the flat of her shears as she rose. “Keep your heel down on the gravel bars so you don’t tear the scab open, and boil that cloth in salt water if you reach a kettle tonight.”
