Location: The Suhe ford — the south bank; the Suhe fork
Date: 12 Frostforge 9943 AZI, Restday, noon → 13 Frostforge, Kindleday, first light
Realm: Lower Realm
By noon there were children's clothes steaming on every hawthorn along the south bank.
Coats and shifts and stockings hung off the thorns in rows, gray and brown and blue, with the smoke from the four fires going through them and the low sun coming through the smoke. It looked like a dyer's yard. It looked like washing day in a village with nothing but children in it. Under the hawthorns the children themselves sat round the fires in corps coats that came down past their knees, with the sleeves rolled four times, and ate the levy's bread out of their hands.
There wasn't much of it. Eleven men's food for the walk to Garrow's gate didn't stretch to eighty-three children, let alone the company. Meifen had given every crumb of it to the children and none to her own, and told her own so, and nobody had said a word about it.
