By mid-afternoon the salt-iron stakes had gone into the frozen mud along the forward siege ditch, and every hammer blow down in the valley had rung through Noll Vey’s foundation stones like a toothache.
Up in the fort courtyard, where Hobb had rigged a canvas windbreak over the outdoor cauldron so the steam would not give Vane’s artillery spotters a fresh target, Sella Rusk stood warming her chapped hands over a grate of charcoal. She had buckled her short sword back onto her belt at the boundary boulder on her way up the hill, and her boots were caked to the ankle with grey river slush.
“Dorn’s terms are plain,” Sella told the circle gathered beside the kitchen arch. “One healer. No fort passage tokens in his pockets, no iron at his belt, not even a herb knife with a steel tang. If Fen walks down to the willow ford at dusk, Soldier Joss will meet him with a shuttered camp lantern and take him through the outer tents of the Third and Fifth Regiments. If anyone from this hill tries to follow him with a blade or a core whisper, Dorn says she’ll hang the courier sack on a pike and let the Auditor have his cannon practice.”
