The late afternoon shadows were lengthening across the village orchard when Sile Rook led Tomas Reed down the gravel path toward the old stone smokehouse.
The air beneath the pear trees was cool and fragrant with the scent of fallen fruit, wood shavings. The sweet, pine-scented smoke of apple wood from the curing chimneys. Two young village lads were raking fallen leaves into neat piles along the drainage ditch. Meanwhile, an old tortoiseshell cat slept peacefully on a flat limestone slab in the last rays of the sun.
Sile walked with his hands tucked behind his back, his heavy shoulders rolling with that slow, tough gait that forty years of marching in iron plate had burned into his skeleton. His old hip clicked softly every four paces. But he used no cane, preferring to let his body bear its own history without artificial props.
“People tell me I should write a chronicle of the water-wars,” Sile said, his gravelly voice breaking the quiet of the orchard. “Some clerk from the university came down on the post-boat last month with three blank parchment books and a bag of silver crowns. Offered to pay me ten crowns a chapter if I’d tell him how we broke Holt’s mercenary cavalry at the under-road drain gates.”
