By the third hour past noon, the wooden weapon rack outside the culvert tent looked like a hedgehog bristles-up in a ditch.
Noll stood twenty paces up the storm gully behind Prit’s red chalk stone, heavy basalt arms folded across his chest, watching the steady trickle of blue coats down the picket track. So long as his boots stayed upslope of the split elder stump, he kept his bargain with Fen: not a single grain of dungeon reach touched the river shingle.
He did not need dungeon reach to see that Fen’s gamble was working.
Every twenty minutes, four or five troopers from the ridge trenches came hobbling down the bank with frost-swollen ankles, powder-scorched thumbs, or barking winter coughs. They unbuckled side-arms at the ash rail, leaned pikes beside Captain Dorn’s broadsword, and ducked into the pine-scented steam over the duckboards. Half an hour later they came out with dry linen around their shins, a warm mug of Hobb’s barley broth, and their ears full of news that no regimental herald read along the line.
Nobody preached mutiny. Sella Rusk knew border soldiers too well to give speeches. Instead, she sat on an upturned water-cask near the rack, whittling replacement tent-pegs with a borrowed camp knife, answering plain questions with plain facts.
