The detached stone bakehouse at the rear of the River Lantern courtyard had been built to hold heat without drafts, and four days ago—when the civic council first converted the room into an emergency surgical station—Elin Hale had hung triple-thick baffles of washed white flour-sacks across the doorway to keep coal dust and street mud off the central kneading table.
Stepping back through those heavy canvas curtains ahead of Jon and Sister Oda, Elin went straight to the cast-iron wash-kettle simmering on the trivet beside the brick bread oven. She plunged her hands and forearms up to the elbows into a porcelain basin of strong white vinegar and boiled well water, scrubbing the dried blood of Cael Ardent’s chest wound from under her fingernails with a stiff bristle brush and a bar of harsh lye soap.
In her border-war nursing days along the northern marches, before she ever married Jon Hale and learned to keep tavern books, Elin had stood at pine tables like this one for sixteen hours at a stretch while wagonloads of frostbitten and pike-torn conscripts were carried in from the snow. Back then, the royal surgeons had reserved their clean linen and poppy tinctures for knights in blued plate while leaving the common trench-diggers to Elin’s vinegar bucket and bone saw.
