Two hours before the fourth bell of Day Four, the mist along the river flats of the Low Sike was so thick it smelled of cold gravel, rotting sedge grass, and the stagnant, iron-heavy scum of marsh pools.
Jon Hale led the two-wheeled dray cart down the sunken cart-track behind the tanners’ drying sheds.
The cart was small, its ash axle creaking in rhythm with the plodding hooves of the Lantern’s old roan mule. In the bed of the wagon, stacked four tiers high beneath a tarred flax tarp, lay forty heavy sacks of coarse rock salt from the inn’s dry shed. Each sack was sewn from thick unbleached hemp, stiff with the dried brine of three summers, weighing sixty pounds apiece.
Alden Bram walked beside the left wheel, his heavy ash cane sinking two inches into the soft river silt with every second stride. He wore a greasy wool cap pulled down over his ears and an oilskin cape over his work smock, his breath whistling in his broad nose with the steady, mechanical labor of a draft bull.
“Keep her close to the alder roots, Jon,” Bram muttered, his voice barely louder than the squelch of the mule’s iron shoes in the mud. “The gravel bed sits four inches beneath the weeds on the high bank. If the near wheel drops off the shelf into the soft clay, we will be two hours levering the axle out with a spruce pole.”
