High on the wind-scoured shale crest of the north bluff, three hundred feet above the black, sleet-whipped marshes of the river valley, Tobin threw his weight against the neck of his bay mare to hold her steady against the gale and swung his right leg off the cantle.
Up here above the tree line, the sleet did not fall in slanting lines; it drove horizontally off the northern fells like handfuls of flung gravel, stinging his chapped cheeks and glazing the dry-laid limestone boulders of the old sheep-fold wall in a quarter-inch crust of rime ice. Below his boots, the world dropped away into pitch darkness, broken only by the smoky orange glare of Harth’s west wall half a mile to the south and the scattered, angry red watch-fires of Marshal Ors’s divided encampment out at Red Ditch to the west.
Tobin led the mare into the semi-circular wind-lee of the tumbledown stone sheep-fold, looped her greased leather reins around a frost-heaved ash stump, and unstrapped the three square, horn-paned whale-oil lanterns from the pack-frame.
His fingers were stiff inside his wet deerskin riding gloves, so he pulled the right glove off with his teeth and shoved his bare hand inside his wool armpit for ten breaths until the blood came back into his thumb. A courier who dropped his flint into the heather in a snow-squall might as well cut his own girth-straps.
