The company roster wasn't written on vellum; it was scratched with greasy charcoal on the planed lid of a salt-pork tub. Leon held the wood under his oxter as the frost gathered along the rim. Nineteen names. The twentieth was crossed through three times with a thumb-smear: Fen, Willem...Nobody had bothered to write down what had killed him, only that the Crown was short one billhook and an iron pot.The men—if nineteen weavers, miller’s carters, and sheep-boys could be called men—sat in the lee of the churchyard dyke with their knees drawn into their smocks. They didn't have uniform coats. Some wore the faded blue wool of the first draft, stained yellow around the armpits and stiff with dried ditch-grease; others wore sheepskin vests with the wool turned inward, the fleece crusted with old manure.Bren Ostler sat apart from them on an overturned turnip crate, scraping the yellow mud off Willem’s boots with a flat slate. He didn't look up when Leon approached. His knuckles were swoll

A timber road laid over wet moss is already treacherous without grease. The split alder poles had gathered a thin, glossy skin of frozen river-fog that made a man tread on his toes like a heron in a pond. When Leon dumped the first half-firkin of cold neatsfoot fat across the logs, the yellow lard didn't soak into the bark; it smeared across the frost in a thick, slick coat that smelled of old slaughter and rendered hide.Bren worked with the flat oak lid from the salt-tub, his great shoulders levering the wood like a plasterer’s float, spreading twenty pounds of stiff grease across six paces of the corduroy track. Get behind the tongue, Leon yelled into the squall. Dace, hold the pikes low. If you lift the tips, they see the iron through the snow!The nineteen boys threw themselves into the ditch behind the overturned artillery wain. They wedged their knees into the frozen sedge, their ash shafts thrust forward beneath the splintered floorboards, the heads resting on the gravel rim

The south angle of the lower ditch smelled of old charcoal, cold bat-droppings, and five winters of stagnant water.It was an arched casemate built under the South Bastion, eight feet of rough-hewn granite overhead with a floor of crushed limestone that turned to white paste wherever sleet blew through the arrow-slits. In the center sat two stone troughs, three foot-treadle grindstones with their sandstone rims notched like broken teeth, and a brick forge-hearth that had cold clinkers choked to the tuyere.Nineteen boys sat down along the stone footing-wall before Leon even called a halt. They dropped like felled birch-poles, their ash pikes clattering onto the flags, their heads lolling onto their knees. Old Hessel’s boy didn't even drop his pack; he curled on his side in the damp lime-dust, his breath whistling in his throat with the dry, hollow wheeze of a dying sheep.Get up, Leon said.His voice didn't rise, but it had that flat iro