When Lord Auditor Orin Vane had stripped Sella Rusk of her Survey commission two winters ago for refusing to drive flooded-out crofters off the Alder Wash road, she had walked out of the Survey House with her head high and her boots clean.
She had been able to bear the dismissal—the cut pay, the cold shoulders from former patrol mates at the tavern well, the whispers that she had gone soft in the head—because she knew what stood in the district books. You could take a ranger’s brass badge and her horse allowance, she had told herself on a hundred cold nights by campfires, and still the logbooks in the archive cellar held the names of the seventeen travelers she had hauled out of snowdrifts, the three collapsed timber bridges she had shored up under rain, and the mine-sinkhole children she had carried back to their mothers. A dishonest auditor could fire you on Tuesday; he could not make Monday disappear.
Now Sella sat on the pine bench in the ruined fort’s Grand Hall and watched Monday disappear off the face of her calfskin license.
Her hands lay flat on the scarred wood on either side of the vellum. She did not let them shake. Her father, who had shod draft horses at the south crossroads for forty years, had taught her early that when a frightened animal sees your hands jerk, you have already lost the halter. Yet inside her chest, beneath the boiled leather of her patched jerkin…
