The shout tore out of the stone archway with the brassy, resonant crack of a fairground herald announcing the final act.
“Halt your boots, Captain Dorn!” Noll projected the words across the dry grass, rolling the syllables along the granite lintel so they seemed to boom from the very clouds above the ditch. “Hear the house rule of this threshold! By the ancient custom of hospitality and the charter of the open hill, no iron enters here in anger! I tell you plain, soldiers of Orren: every weapon raised against my gate will turn to flowers!”
The words struck the midday heat like a cold bucket of well water thrown over a blacksmith’s forge.
Out on the gravel verge, the front rank of the Crown platoon broke its steady advance. Thirty pairs of boots, moving in crisp four-beat cadence, faltered into an irregular scuff of leather on loose shale.
Captain Arda Dorn did not flinch, but her raised right gauntlet paused in the air. Her eyes, pale grey beneath the flared rim of her steel kettle-hat, snapped from the dark opening of the arch up to the crenels of the old parapet where only dry moss grew. Behind her, Lord Auditor Orin Vane remained motionless, though the corners of his thin mouth tightened into a faint, dry crease of disgust.
