For seven winters before the hill fort ever opened an eye, Sella Rusk had known the back lanes of Mere by the sound of her boot-heels on the drainage stones.
A Survey ranger who rode the north circuit learned never to use the front arch of the King’s Horn Coaching Inn when her coat was wet and her saddlebags held anything worth counting. The front arch belonged to wine-sellers, toll clerks, and ostlers who took sixpence a month from the bailiff’s office to report which timber factors drank past curfew. The back lane behind the cooper’s yard belonged to barrel-hoops, wet ash cinders, and stray cats.
Sella slipped through the gap in the cooper’s willow fence as the parish clock cleared its iron throat for midnight.
The sleet had thinned to a cold drizzle smelling of coal-smoke and tallow. Inside her jerkin, pressed against her ribs beneath the strap of her scarred oak-and-iron shield, Tessa’s cold chisel and the grounded oath-silver token sat like river ice. Even through three layers of oiled sheepskin, Sella felt a dead buzz that made the old scar on her collarbone itch.
At Tanner’s Alley, two March Ledger watchers stood under a chandler’s porch, warming mittens over a shuttered tin lantern. Sella stepped onto an upended hogshead, hooked her fingers into the slate coping of the washhouse, and pulled herself onto the lead gutter between brewhouse and stables.
