The oil in the hanging lamp smelled of sheep fat and stale rosemary, burning down to an amber bead over the trestle table. Outside, eight thousand Crown soldiers kept their watchfires banked against the mountain frost, waiting for the sunrise trumpets. Inside, nineteen people sat with elbows planted on scarred pine planks, listening to the small, dry clack of Prit’s bone fingers against a slate.
“Eight hours,” Cale said, rubbing his ink-stained knuckles. The clerk had three tallow dips burning before him among surveyor charts and requisition rolls. “If Gant follows standard practice, sappers will drive sighting stakes into the south ridge while the mist is still gray. At dawn the artillery opens fire. By third bell the outer breastwork will be gravel.”
“The breastwork is already half gravel,” Edren Dene remarked from his bench near the hearth. He coughed, a raspy scrape from thirty years in the Crown silver mine, laying his hands flat against his breeches. “The mortar was burnt lime and river sand when the third Duke held the hill. You tap it with a pickaxe and it turns to flour. If Vane shoots solid iron at the gate arch, the stones drop into the ditch before breakfast.”
