By noon, the valley was quiet in a way it had not been since Vane’s advance guard first entered the pass.
The brass twelve-pounders on the south ridge had been pulled back two hundred yards from their forward sighting revetments, parked beneath tarpaulins behind a newly dug ditch. Three thousand infantrymen were clearing timber along the river flats, not to build siege ladders, but to construct a permanent cordon of sharpened stakes and log breastworks. Mere was sealed off from the south roads just as tightly as before, but the immediate threat of solid iron smashing through the nursery vaults had receded behind a wall of shovel-turned dirt.
Up in the ruined fort, Noll Vey sat surrounded by an ocean of power.
The white ledger stone in his central vault radiated a steady, humming warmth that reached through three floors of limestone. In his mind, the unspent claim credit felt like a full reservoir after a spring thaw—millions of points of raw reality-force drawn from the collective terror of eight thousand soldiers.
“We have to get the weavers out,” Tessa said, leaning over a slate map in the north watchtower with Sella Rusk. “Vane has two companies of light horse patrolling the lower river ford. If we wait nine days, the town will run out of salt and oats. But if we have this much stone-craft to spend, Noll, why can’t you drop the sheep-pen culvert four feet into the shale and run a drift under the north ridge?”
