A prince in the mud looks like an overturned kettle.Rowan lay in the dead bilberries with his head twisted against an iron-stone, his right knee drawn up toward his belly as if he were still trying to find a stirrup that wasn't there. The gold wire on his steel burgonet caught the gray twilight, dull and bent, smeared with black ditch-grease where his cheek had plowed the turf.Nobody moved to pick him up. A foot-soldier who touches a royal limb without an order gets his hand taken off by the provost; every boy from the valley knew that much of the law, even if he didn't know his letters."Is he dead?" Bren whispered. He had backed himself against the tumbled wall until the rough grit-stones dug through his sheepskin vest. "Breathing," Leon said. He didn't drop his hammer. He walked two paces through the sleet, crouched in the heather, and laid two fingers against the hollow below Rowan's jaw, just as he'd watched Elena do with the fro

The fog didn't lift with the sun; it only turned yellow, the color of bad tallow in an unwashed dish.Dawn on the Great Sike brought no birds. The only sound was the slow, rhythmic *drip-plip* of sleet melting off the tumbled grit-stones of the sheepfold into the peat mud, and the distant, dry rattle of an iron-tired wheel turning over stone two miles south.Corporal Karr was awake. He hadn't slept; an old soldier’s eyes don't shut when the wind smells of burned grease and horse-sweat. He stood by the sheepfold opening, paring his thumb-callus with his skinning knife, letting the thin white curls of dead skin drop into the bilberries."They aren't bringing light horse," Karr said, not looking at Leon.Leon sat on his haunches beside Willem Fen. The boy's forehead had cooled from the fever-scorch of the night, but it had that slick, damp feel of rising dough. His lips were split down the middle, crusted with gray scum. Leon took his wooden horn-spo

Forty pounds of dry corn-powder in an oak cask carries like twenty stone of wet grain: it doesn't give with the shoulder. It shifts its weight with every lurch of the hips, the iron hoops biting through sheepskin into the collarbone until the muscle goes numb.They moved off the Sheep-Trod an hour before the gray drizzle stopped.Bren Ostler had one cask lashed to his massive shoulders with the pioneer’s trace-rope, the oak staves creaking against his spine with every stride. He was wearing Willem’s boots. They were two sizes too small across the instep; the stiff, black calfskin had already rubbed his heels raw, and he walked with that wide, rolling duck-tread of a ditcher trying to favor both shins at once. But he didn't complain. Every time his boots sucked out of the peat with a wet *shluck*, he looked down at the boxwood pegs in the welt, his jaw set like an iron vise.Durn and the three remaining levy boys carried the second cask slung on an ash pike between them, stumbling thro

The second cask of corn-powder had leaked an inch of fine black grain into Bren’s pack-linen. It smelled of sulfur and old tallow, and when Leon rubbed a pinch between his thumb and forefinger, the charcoal left a stain that cold spring-water wouldn't touch.They hit the ravine lip an hour before dawn.Millstone Creek was not a broad water like the Redwater; it was a black, spitting trench cut deep into the limestone shoulder of the fells. Forty feet below the crag, the water boiled through a narrows no wider than three hay-wains, smashing against round boulders the size of draft-oxen. In the summer, drovers took their sheep through the shale bed with the water barely lapping their shanks. Tonight, the creek ran bank-full—gray, frothing with mountain mud, its noise trapped between two sheer walls of split slate until the ground hummed beneath their boots."The sluice is above the bend," Leon said.He lay in the wet heather on the western rim, looking down. Prince Rowan was propped ag

The willow-bottoms were gray with frost that hadn't melted under the noon sun. Leon led the gray mare by the cheek-strap, her iron shoe clicking softly against the frozen river-marl every third pace. He kept his shoulder pressed to her jaw to muffle any sneeze; the cold air smelled of dry chaff, horse-urine, and the unmistakable, sweet stink of green wood burning in fifty hearths at once.They halted where the mill-leat cut behind Bren’s father’s slaughter-pens. The wooden paling was black with pig-blood that had soaked into the oak three generations ago, but there were no pigs now. The pens were empty, the slip-rails thrown down into the nettles, and two carters in blue royal surcoats were sitting on an overturned scalding-tub, sharing a clay pipe."Stay down," Leon breathed, pushing Bren flat into the dead reeds behind the dyke. Prince Rowan was barely conscious, tied across the cantle with sheep-twine, his head lolling against the mare's lath