Bren Ostler came over the forge wall an hour past midnight with a boar spear in both fists and a plan to be a coward. Leon was awake. He had been awake most of every night since the horn, and the sword lay on the table, and he had been trying to learn its weight like a stranger's name. He looked at Bren. Bren looked at the sword. Neither of them found anything clever to say. "The fells," Bren said at last. "Shepherd's bothy above Grey Tarn. Hay's still sweet — I checked it in June. There's a spring, and past the snowline nothing lives but a man who's decided to." The laugh came out of him sideways, wrong-shaped. "Nobody's firstborn up there but the sheep." Leon set the sword down instead of answering, and that was answer enough, and Bren's jaw started going the way it did before the slaughtering shed, when the first pig fought. Then the stair creaked, once, twice — a one-armed man comes down stairs honestly — and Garrick Va

The ash from the high mill reached them two leagues before the turnpike.It was not wood ash—fine and white like the dust of birch logs in a hearth. It was greasy, yellow-brown flecks that stuck to the sweat on Leon’s forearms and tasted of burned fat and wet thatch. The wind blew from the south-southwest, straight down the trough of the river valley, carrying the smell of forty smallholdings reduced to cinder.Nobody sang. In the tales the tavern singers brought through Harrowden during the Martinmas fairs, levies went to war with drums and ribald rhymes about milkmaids. This column walked like cattle being moved between parched pastures: heads low, feet dragging through the flint-strewn loam, the only steady sound the dry rattle of Willem Fen’s split boot on the stones."Pick your toes up, Willem," Leon said under his breath."I am," Willem rasped. His face was slick as wet lard, though the morning air had the cold cut of early autumn. "The moss

The pikes didn't charge. That was the first lie the songs told about war: that men ran at each other screaming until iron met bone. Real armies walked. They walked because sixteen feet of seasoned ash weighed twenty pounds, and a man who ran forty paces with that weight in his fists was blown before he ever smelled the ditch.Step. Clatter. Squelch.Four hundred boots hitting the wet marsh-grass together. The sound had a drag to it—the suck of the Black Bog trying to claim the heels of the men on the left flank."Don't look at the points," Leon said. His voice sounded dry, like oats rattling in an empty trough.Willem Fen was still sitting on his backside in the bottom of the ditch, his split boot tucked under his good thigh to keep the raw heel out of the peat water. "I can't see the points anyway, Leon. I only see their knees.""Look at their shins, then," Leon told him. He reached down, took Willem's billhook, and drove the h

A trace-chain in cold grease does not want to bend. It fights the knuckles like a dead eel, the iron links stiff with sheep-fat and road-grit."Hold the timber, Bren," Leon said. His voice was muffled, his forehead pressed right against the underside of the wagon-bed where the axle-tree was weeping sap.Bren Ostler had his broad back wedged beneath the wagon's tail-board, his knees shaking in the mud, veins on his neck swollen like dock-leaves in summer. "Hurry it, Leon. My shoulder's slipping on the spruce.""Don't talk. Just take the weight."Leon laid his father’s blade along the split oak. The cold iron bit into the raw wood with a dull crunch. He took the heavy trace-chain, wrapped it once, twice, three times around both the timber and the length of the steel, then pulled the running end through the iron ring until the links ground together."Willem. The cold-chisel."Willem Fen didn't stand up. He crawled through the black