The greasy light of dawn reached Harth through a veil of wet, unbreathable smoke.
From the east, across the marshes of the low reach, the morning arrived not with the clean bronze of autumn sun, but with the murky, sulfur-stained gray of burning timber. The wind had swung around to the south before the fourth bell, carrying the reek of drenched palisade posts, boiling pitch, and the bitter charcoal of three outer barns that the imperial skirmishers had fired during the night watch.
Jon Hale sat upright on the end of the flour bench in the bakehouse hospital. His right arm was pinned across his chest in the stiff linen sling Elin had fashioned, the bulky white layers of boiled cloth smelling faintly of mutton fat and bruised comfrey root. Every time a siege engine thrummed against its stops half a league down the road, a dull, sympathetic throb pulsed through the marrow of his radial bone, answering the vibration of the earth with its own deep ache.
Across the room, perched on an overturned firkin of dry salt, Sir Cael Ardent sat with his elbows resting on his knees and his head buried in his scarred hands. He had not washed the coal dust from his jaw. His mail shirt was dull with road grime and soot, its links sagging around his shoulders as if the iron wire had lost its temper in the cellar steam. The heavy gold medallion of the returner’s seal hung loose beneath his unfastened…
