Sella Rusk’s words hung in the cool air of the Grand Hall like the smell of gun-smoke after a misfire.
Up in his western niche, Noll Vey looked past the pine worktable, past Ossa Flint’s grey-chalk triangle, and out through his threshold sight toward the outer battery trench along the hillside.
Out there in the frozen mud, fifty paces beyond the gatehouse arch, the tangled iron-and-briar hedge of his flower-spear lie (D-08) still thrust its jagged, rust-red thorns toward the clouds. When he had shouted that boast across the ditch two weeks ago—turning a child’s handful of wild rose hips into a spiked breastwork to stop Vane’s soldiers from seizing the yard—Noll had felt wonderfully clever. He had told himself that a showman who couldn’t pull a thorny rabbit out of his hat when his friends were cornered wasn’t worth the lime in his wall.
Now he looked at those iron briars through the lens of Ossa’s three-anchor diagram, and a cold sickness crept through every facet of his blue stone.
“The flower-spears,” Noll said quietly from the mortar crack above the mantle.
Tessa Dene turned her head from the hearth. “Noll?”
“When the soldiers came up the trench with the battering hook,” Noll said, his voice dropping low as the pieces clicked together with ugly, undeniable neatness, “I broke our one-claim-a-day rule. I told myself I was saving the gate. And the moment those briars ripped out of the earth and put a thorn through young Soldier Joss’s forearm…
