Arda Dorn had carried royal dispatches through three border campaigns, two cholera quarantines, and one winter mutiny at the Salt Ford, and she had always carried them in a regulation saddle-pouch stamped with the brass crown of the First Regiment.
Today she folded six witnessed copies of Master Serit’s estate wage bond into an oilskin packet, tucked them inside the breast lining of a plain grey wool coat with the shoulder straps cut off, and handed the second oilskin bundle to Soldier Joss.
Joss stood by the outer store-room arch, shifting his weight slightly off his left leg where the briar-and-iron flower-spear thorns had torn his calf earlier in the siege. Fen’s linen bandages still showed beneath the split seam of his regulation trousers, and his standard camp bread knife—the blunt-tipped ration blade issued to every infantryman in the Third Regiment—hung in its leather frog at his hip.
“You take the fourth and fifth company circles along the lower ditch, Joss,” Dorn said, buttoning her coat to the collar against the smoky draft. “Don’t ask for the captains first. Give the ration compact and the High Reed wage bond straight to the mess sergeants and the corporal-clerks by the soup wagons. Once twenty privates have read that Lady Serit’s wool mills are backing their winter silver and Hobb has weighed out seven days of barley, no company officer will be able to burn the sheet in private.”
