Three miles away in the upper yard of the hill fort, Noll Vey focused his threshold hearing through the small blue core token tucked inside the hem of Sella Rusk’s leather brigandine.
The acoustic conduit was thin and brittle—stone transmitting through stone over three miles of folded valley shale—but every word spoken in that underground gallery reached his consciousness with the cold, metallic clarity of a knife tapping on an anvil. In the Grand Hall of the fort, Prit perched upon the flour barrel with his slate balanced on his knees, his grey chalk hovering over the witness column. Beside him, Cale leaned against the timber doorframe with his inkhorn uncapped, listening to the faint, gravelly murmur vibrating through the masonry.
In the deep drift of the silver-iron mine, Sella Rusk did not drop her ash shield.
She held the heavy wood at chest height, angled just enough to keep the point of the nearest spear from finding her throat, her side-sword resting easy in its scabbard. Her breath was slow and rhythmic, misting in the cold, tallow-lit air.
“Good morning, Captain Dorn,” Sella said across the five paces of damp gravel that separated them. “You’re thirty minutes early for the morning inspection. Did the road watch send for you, or did you hear the bells from the lower turnpike?”
