The wind off the crag tasted of sleet and wet spruce bark.
Captain Arda Dorn walked the picket line with her hands clasped behind her back, the brass tips of her scabbard clicking against her left greave with every third stride. Her thirty men stood in two ranks behind the low ditch wall, their heavy grey wool cloaks pulled tight across their gorgets.
She stopped before Private Hurn, whose boots were sunk two inches into the frozen yellow clay. She reached down, took the rim of his painted wooden shield between two gloved fingers, and gave it a sharp upward jerk.
The leather arm-loop held, but the copper rivet at the upper boss was loose, rattling with a dull tinny clatter.
“Get that rivet peened over before dusk, Hurn,” Dorn said, her voice quiet, flat, and dry. “If a cross-breeze catches a loose rim on a night watch, the rattle will keep your corporal awake, and an awake corporal is a miserable companion on a frost picket.”
“Yes, Captain,” the soldier mumbled, pulling his hands back into his sleeves.
Behind the picket line, twenty paces back from the muddy turnoff, smoke rose from the brick chimney of Lord Auditor Orin Vane’s heated pavilion.
