Half an hour later, the long oak trestle table in the River Lantern taproom was cleared of ale mugs and strewn with coarse grey rock-salt from Bessa Karr’s curing tub. With Corporal Rann propped upright on the corner settle while Elin stitched the incised flesh of his left shoulder with waxed flax thread and a curved bone needle, the two younger returned sappers used their scarred knuckles to push the spilled salt into a raised relief map of Marshal Ors’s divided encampment at Red Ditch.
Jon Hale stood at the head of the board with his hands resting on the walnut back of a chair, while Lady Signe Lorr, Alden Bram, and Iven leaned over the salt ridges. Near the hearth pillar, Sir Cael Ardent stood looking down at the table, his quilted gambeson buttoned to the chin over the dormant Returner Seal and his left hip still bare of the greatsword resting behind Jon’s bar.
“Here is the old stone lime-road running down from the west ridge,” the twenty-year-old spade-man said, drawing a deep groove through the salt with the handle of a horn spoon. “Ors’s three front assault divisions—the heavy pike blocks and the torsion catapult crews—are massed along this high shale bench four hundred yards from your west palisade. Between them and the rear baggage stockade sits a quarter-mile of dug peat-bog and the old drainage ditch.”
