The water south of the Sunken Willow Coppice didn’t reflect the sky.
It was the color of boiled tea steeped in rusted iron, thick with dissolved bog-iron and dark tannic acids that turned the foam behind Pip’s punt pole a deep, greasy orange. A dense carpet of pale green sphagnum moss choked the margins of the channel, quaking with a slow, sickening heave whenever the boat’s wake lapped against the bank.
Tomas stood in the waist of the flat-bottomed punt, his boots braced against the cross-ribs, his hands resting on the ash-wood pack frame. Over his face he had tied a fresh linen breathing mask, soaked in sharp malt vinegar and pressed tight with two leather thongs behind his neck. The acidic tang bit at his nostrils, but it was necessary. Every fifty paces, the black mud beneath the channel burped up clusters of oily bubbles that burst with a faint, hissing pop, releasing the sweet, rotten-egg stench of swamp gas.
Beside him, Nessa knelt with her sounding staff. She watched the surface of the water with careful concentration. She had removed her sound horn. She tucked it inside her oilskin coat to protect the brass from the skin-burning fog, relying entirely on her eyes and the tactile shakes passing through the ash staff into her palms.
