Half a mile north of the Old Bridge, where the freezing backwater of the drowned pastures met the uncut sedge-beds below Red Ditch, Iven lay flat on her belly in six inches of black peat-silt with her chin tucked against the rotten bark of a willow root.
Through the driving sleet to the south, the night sky above Harth’s west wall glowed like a banked forge hearth, streaked with the greasy orange trails of Marshal Ors’s second pitch-jar volley. Even through half a mile of wet marsh air, Iven could smell the familiar alchemical stench of the Ash Host’s siege-pots—three parts boiled pine-tar, one part yellow rock-sulfur, and a measure of rancid mutton tallow to keep the resin from flaking in the cold. Two winters ago, before the border campaign reached the river valley, she had calculated the trajectory tables for those exact torsion engines on the practice ranges outside Red Ford.
Behind her in the tall reeds, Tobin crouched beside the grey garrison pack-mule and his bay mare, holding a wad of wet moss over both animals’ nostrils so they would not whinny at the smell of the cavalry pickets fifty yards up the clay bank.
Iven did not look back at the burning town wall. She pressed her left ear flat against the submerged woody trunk of the willow root and closed her eyes, counting the vibrations traveling through the frozen subsoil from the corduroy timber road above them.
