The wind on the Raven’s Notch carried the sharp, bitter stench of frozen horse droppings and wet charcoal.
Sella Rusk kept her gloved palms spread open at shoulder height as she topped the final granite rise. The goat track behind her was coated in a treacherous skin of gray glaze-ice, where every slip of an unnailed heel meant a sixty-foot slide into the scree gullies below the timber mill. Behind her, Fen climbed with his head down, breathing through his wool muffler in harsh, rhythmic gasps, both hands clutching the canvas straps of his medical satchel to keep the glass jars from knocking together.
“Halt right there, Ranger!” an iron-lunged voice barked through the whistling sleet. “Step two paces to your left and stand on the flat stone! If the boy reaches for his pockets, you both take two quarrels through the chest!”
Sella stopped on the frost-dusted ledge thirty paces below the ridge crest.
Before her, the black-and-gold dragon banner of the First Veteran Foot snapped violently in the gale. Behind a waist-high parapet of dry-stacked granite boulders, forty heavy siege crossbows rested on wooden forks, their square steel spans cocked and loaded with three-inch square-head bolts. The men behind the sights were not twitching conscripts. They were veteran border archers with blackened iron kettle-hats tied down over wool caps, their eyes squinting against the sleet, their fingers resting light as feathers on the bone triggers.
