Frost had crusted the willow roots along the river gravel by the time Sella Rusk walked down the hill road with her hands empty and Noll Vey’s confession tucked under her arm.
She knew every frost-heaved rut of this track. For six winters she had ridden it in a March Ledger surcoat with a brass transit tube at her saddlebow, logging spring runoff and timber tallies for clerks who filed her warnings in the cellar and sold the dry lumber to Crown contractors anyway. Leaving the fort’s boundary stones behind her felt like stepping out of a warm kitchen into an icehouse; the gentle, humming awareness of Noll’s Bastion walls dropped away at the old milestone, replaced by the raw, woodsmoke-and-latrine stink of eight thousand men camped across a narrow valley.
At the northern edge of Mere, where the cart track forked toward the iron market well, a crowd of forty townsfolk and a dozen off-duty teamsters had already gathered around the timber notice-post. Sella had pinned six of Noll’s printed handbills there an hour before sunrise before circling up the ridge path to watch the camp lines wake.
Now, standing in the shadow of the old timber-mill sluice, she watched Lord Auditor Orin Vane make use of them.
