Sella Rusk walked half a pace ahead of Captain Lira’s left shoulder, her boots crunching in the salted slush of the gatehouse arch and the cold iron wagon-key swinging against her belt.
She had led delve teams into collapsed silver drifts and marched patrol columns across flooded timber-booms, yet she had never felt air as thick as the six yards of stone passage between the outer portcullis groove and the inner courtyard line. To Sella’s left and right, Noll Vey’s Bastion walls stood solid and grey, dressed with fresh white lime mortar that smelled of river sand. Behind her, eighty pairs of ragged army boots came on in even, disciplined two-step—left, right, left—the muscle memory of six months on the royal road keeping the vanguard company in military cadence even with their pikes locked in a wagon behind them.
At the white threshold stone where Noll’s claimed territory began, the first file of unarmed soldiers stepped across the line.
Sella saw the change hit them before they had taken three strides into the courtyard.
The young windburned corporal right behind Lira—the one who had flinched at the click of a pike-butt ten minutes ago—stopped mid-step, his mouth falling slightly open as he looked up at the grey winter sky between the battlements. Beside him, a grey-bearded veteran with a canvas bandage wrapped around his shin put a hand to the back of his own neck, blinking rapidly as though someone had just lifted a sixty-pound grain sack off his collarbones.
