As the high bronze bell in the North Weir gatehouse began to toll the full five strokes of fourth-day dawn, the grey river fog over the eighty-yard gravel spit tore apart under the first cold gust of morning wind.
Thirty families and twenty-four of the thirty carters were already past the middle ash stakes, scrambling hand-over-hand along Harlan Pike’s tarred hemp guide-ropes up the western stone sill into the arms of Captain Dain’s watchmen and Elin’s blanket crews.
Forty yards further out on the wet limestone shingle, emerging from the eastern willow-break with mud up to the axles, came the last, heaviest baggage-wagon—a four-wheeled commissary wain carrying four pregnant blacksmiths’ wives, five small children, and a load of salvaged forge-anvils, pulled by a lathered pair of draught-mules and pushed from behind by the six volunteers of the rear-guard.
Jon knew all six of those faces through the drifting mist before the fifth stroke of the dawn bell finished echoing off the bluff.
At the near rear wheel, straining with both bruised hands locked on the mud-caked oak spokes, was young Tallis Vane—the nineteen-year-old tanner’s apprentice from the North Quay, nephew to old Timothy Vane whose net-barking cottage had been erased in the eleventh return. Beside him at the tail-board was Kessa Mill, the twenty-year-old fuller’s daughter with her dark braid tied back in a red rag, carrying a seven-year-old boy with a splinted club-foot propped against her hip.
