At five in the morning, while inspecting the defensive outer edge where the saboteurs had cut through the brush fence, Tomas Reed stepped into a frozen drainage furrow. His right boot broke through the brittle rime crust, sinking into three inches of soft, greasy clay.
Crunch-shnk.
A sharp, blinding agony lanced up Tomas’s right leg, so intense that the breath froze in his throat. He caught himself on the ash-wood fence post, his knuckles whitening as he dragged his foot from the mud.
Protruding from the center of his thick cowhide sole was the blackened shank of a four-pointed iron caltrop. A brutal military weapon forged with three-inch three-sided spikes, designed so that one point always stood upright in the mud to cripple horses and infantry.
Tomas hopped on his left foot to the tailgate of the baggage wagon, his jaw clamped tight. He sat upon the timber board, unlaced the frozen boot with trembling fingers. Then he eased his foot from the leather. The iron spike had punched clean through the half-inch oak-tanned leather sole. He drove an inch and a half into the fleshy pad of his right heel.
Dark, dark blood dripped into the grey straw.
Nessa Vale was beside him in seconds, her face pale in the dawn light. “Don’t pull it straight out, Tomas! The edges are barbed!”
