In fifty-one years of dodging parish constables, angry theatrical landlords, and men whose brothers had bought tonic water that turned out to be rainwater and cloves, Noll Vey had developed strong opinions about how an enemy ought to enter a room.
A proper enemy kicked the door. He wore brass on his shoulders, or at least boots with iron heels that struck sparks off the threshold, and he shouted a warrant loud enough to give an honest showman three seconds to slide out the back window with the cash box. There was a civic decency to loud boots. They let everyone in the hall know where the stage ended and the running began.
The man who walked through the outer arch of the hill fort at suppertime did not kick anything at all.
Noll felt him first through the sixth stone token—the flat slate disc carved with a true map of the hill bypass that Tomas the carter had wedged into the mile-post above the collapsed lower bridge. The token had given Noll no whisper of speech, because the rider had spoken nothing to the stone as he passed it. Instead, Noll had sensed only the quiet, measured crunch of a single pair of boots stepping off the road while twenty mounted troopers reined their horses in beside the boundary ditch outside the yard.
