Edric Vesk lowered the engine’s arm for the last time on the thirty-fifth day of the siege, with his own hands on the release-pawl and the whole valley holding its breath around him.
He had not expected to feel anything. He had built a great many engines in his life, for a great many queens, and he had taken each of them down afterward with the same care he had used to put it up, piece by piece, marking the timbers and logging the pins and sending the counterweights back to the Corvanne stores in carts. A siege engine was a tool. It had no more memory than a hammer. But the arm had been made from the Hold’s own gate-oak, grain for grain with the wedge the Forge had stamped, and he had come to know that grain as a man learns the moods of a difficult horse, and when the pawl came free under his palm and the great arm sank slowly down onto its cradle with a long groan of old wood, he found that he had to step back from it and look at the sky for a moment.
“Marshal,” said his aide, at his shoulder.
