The afternoon sun sat pale and low over the western ridge, casting long shadows across the gravel yard of the fort.
From his core in the hall wall, Noll Vey could feel every scuff and stamp of boot leather on the courtyard flagstones. A modest crowd had wandered up the switchback from Mere—carters who had finished their midday grain haul, two apprentices from the riverside cooperage, and three aspiring delvers who had spent the last half hour nervously adjusting their leather harness straps by the water trough.
The delvers were young, fresh-faced, and visibly terrified. Kip, a wiry lad with an ill-fitting boiled-leather brigandine, kept testing the spring on his lantern shutter. Bess, a cooper’s daughter with broad shoulders and a short delve-pole tipped with a blunt bronze hook, stood guard over their shared sack of tallow candles. Between them huddled Fennik, the youngest of the three, whose thin wrists poked out of a homespun tunic that smelled of damp wool and turnip cellar. Fennik clutched a bundle of dry torch-rushes to his chest as though it were a royal scepter, his pale eyes darting toward every shadow along the foundation masonry.
Near the old stone cistern, Hesta Quill had set up her portable theater. Milo sat perched on an upturned salt tub, maintaining a slow, rhythmic thrum on his sheepskin drum that made the courtyard dust vibrate in neat, concentric rings. Sura, clad in a faded green acrobat’s doublet, somersaulted backward off an empty pork barrel, caught two painted…
