The frozen turnpike into High Redoubt rumbled beneath the iron-shod wheels of the heavy baggage wagon. As Tomas Reed led his tired team past the outlying timber cabins. The mist was rose from the bitter salt flats, cold and white as wool.
News of the digging had raced ahead of the convoy. By the time Tomas halted the horses in the gravel square before the claims tent, more than six hundred people were standing in the freezing twilight.
They were the survivors of the Fourth Commoner Levy and their families. Old women in faded grey shawls, weavers with stooped backs and calloused fingers, and men who walked with the uneven rhythm of wooden pegs and willow crutches. None of them shouted. They stood in total, respectful silence, their breath mingling in a great pale cloud above the square.
Tomas stepped down from the wagon, unhitched the tailgate. Then he threw back the heavy oilskin tarpaulins. The three dark lead plates lay gleaming faintly in the lantern light, their arrow-cut letters stark and clear in the cold air.
Sergeant Karr hobbled to the wagon bed, reached up with a trembling hand, and laid his rough palm against the metal. He found the section marked Oakhaven Company and traced the names of forty boys who had marched out of his home village in the summer of Year 021.
