The peat bog didn’t freeze, even though autumn frost silvered the sedge grass along the ditch bank.
Tomas Reed knelt on a hemlock plank laid across the black muck. The timber groaned under his knees, its underside coated in oily slime that smelled of old sulfur and boiled cabbage. He dipped his bare right fingers into the channel. Then, the water felt like bathwater drawn an hour too early. It was lukewarm, greasy, and slick between the whorls of his fingerprints.
Behind him, Captain Sile Rook stood on the firm gravel of the wagon road, his scarred jaw set in a hard line. Sile’s plain forged guard-sword rested against his hip, its sword sheath wrapped in waxed linen to keep out the marsh damp. His iron ring of forty-two keys clicked faintly in the morning wind.
“Three weeks now, Provost,” Elder Mallow said, his voice raspy from fifty winters of breathing peat smoke. The old man leaned on a notched ditching spade, his wool mittens soaked through with greasy silt. “First the pond weed turned white and died off in strings. Then the mud-eels came to the surface belly-up, their bellies blistered yellow like they had been scalded in a wash-kettle. A horse won’t drink from the run. A dog won’t put its paws in the ditch.”
