“Wait a breath,” Tessa Dene said from the tool alcove, greased flax packing draped over her forearm and her salvaged bread knife at her apron belt. “You want to pitch a canvas tent on the river shingle—right under the noses of Battery-Chief Gant’s twelve-pounders—and ask Noll to heat it without putting a ward on the cloth?”
“If he puts a ward on the cloth,” Fen said, hands flat beside his boiled linen rolls, “the tent becomes part of the House of Open Doors. The moment a Crown soldier drinks warm broth under a claimed lintel, Vane’s clerks can write him down as crossing to a hostile stronghold. And worse—if a man carries a spear to the tent rack while still under army orders, Noll’s ninth door will count him inside the threshold ring.”
Sella Rusk folded her arms across her ranger’s jerkin, studying the young healer. “Dorn gave you her word at the picket fire?”
“She gave me her word while holding the lantern over the carter’s ankle,” Fen replied. “Her hospital tents on the ridge are sodden through. Vane requisitioned half the braziers for clerk pavilions around the Survey House, so Dorn’s surgeons dress frostbitten toes by tallow dips that freeze in saucers. She said if I found twenty yards of flat gravel out of musket-shot, and swore on clean iron there was no core trickery under the sod, she would detail two surgeons and a water-cart to meet us at noon.”
