The frost had taken the ditch water three days earlier, skinning the puddles with yellow rime that crunched under wheel rims like sugar crusts. Across the open yard of the hill fort, grey cloud bellied down from the northern notch, dragging the smell of wet slate and spruce needles across the battlements.
Hesta Quill stood beside her painted handcart with a copper bodkin clamped between her teeth. Her troupe’s luggage was modest: three wicker hampers of frayed gold braid, four pine instrument cases, and an enormous papier-mâché bull’s head that stared toward the gatehouse with painted glass eyes.
“Move that hamper two inches east, Martin,” Hesta said around the bodkin. “If the paint pot cracks against the tambourine again, our Duke of Morven will recite his monologue with rose vermilion smeared across his nose.”
Near the hearth inside the kitchen arch, where the stone warmth pulsed steady against the valley draft, Tessa Dene worked with her head bent low. Her fingers were swift with the heavy tailor’s needle. Across her knees lay the hem of an imperial purple mantle—what passed for velvet after five fairs in the rain, mostly the colour of bruised turnip.
Beside her, Cale smoothed the parchment sheets flat with a horn burnisher. Each document bore the brown gall-ink signatures of three valley witnesses and the neat summary lines Cale had drafted before dawn: the account of the burned foundations, the roster of Sergeant Berr’s buried guards, and Ossa Flint’s sketch of the three collar anchors tethering…
