The Willow Eyot was a teardrop-shaped island of hard gravel and black peat, hidden in the maze of dead canals three miles south of the drowned hospice.
Dense thickets of weeping willow and black alder grew down to the water’s edge. Their trailing branches formed an iron-hard curtain of gray twigs that brushed against the sides of Pip’s punt as he guided the boat into a narrow, hidden cove.
At the center of the eyot, nestled beneath the roots of a huge four-hundred-year-old willow tree, stood a turf-hut.
It was barely larger than a bread-oven, built of stacked peat sods heavy with willow stakes, roofed with bundles of dried cattails weighted down with river stones. A thin wisp of pale, sweet-smelling smoke rose from a chimney hole cut into the sod, smelling not of guard post sulfur. But of burning birch bark and dried peat.
Tomas stepped out of the punt onto the firm gravel shore, his boots crunching softly on the stones. He motioned for Nessa and Pip to stay by the boat. He unhooked his carrier’s medallion so that the brass scale-and-rope crest hung visible against the gray wool of his chest.
He walked up the narrow path to the low wooden door of the hut, knocking three times with the back of his bare hand: thump, thump, thump.
