The gravel apron before Checkpoint Three was filled with an army such as the Weeping Delta had never seen. There were no banners, no drum rolls, no glittering breastplates. There were only eight hundred marsh men, women, and older youths, clad in coarse frieze coats, oiled leather aprons, and thigh-high calfskin wading boots.
In their hands they carried the tools of their survival. Six hundred and forty heavy steel ditch-spades with ash handles polished by decades of ditch-clearing. One hundred and twenty forged iron grubbing mattocks. Two score of timber-clearing crosscut saws. And sixty iron-tipped boat-hooks. Beside them stood eighty yoke of shaggy, wide-horned marsh oxen, their heavy wooden sleds loaded not with commercial freight, but with forty-gallon water casks and wicker hampers of tools.
Tomas Reed stood upon an overturned salt hogshead at the head of the column. Beside him stood Elder Maren of Bitter-Reeds and the turncoat corporal of the guard post, who had stripped the royal insignia from his leather buff-coat.
“Listen to me, people of the fen!” Tomas shouted, his voice reaching the furthest ranks of the assembly. “The Barons have fired the southern peat. They believe the smoke will drive us north like frightened rabbits. They believe that if they burn Alia Sen’s archives, the law will never know the names of the men who stole your land!”
