The sleet melting on Captain Arda Dorn’s wool shoulders smelled of woodsmoke, frozen gravel, and the sharp vinegar tang of gun-cleaning rags.
She descended the southern gallery stairs two at a time, her heavy cavalry boots ringing on the wet limestone steps. Her hands were bare, red and raw from the gale that whipped across the Raven’s Notch, but under her left arm she carried the leather map-case holding Colonel Vask’s counter-proposals. She had not worn a sword belt for five days, yet her posture remained the upright, unhurried stance of an officer who had spent twenty winters turning panicked company files into steady battle lines.
When she reached the lower arch of the Hall of Witness, the warm, sulfurous draft of the buried chamber washed over her face like the breath of a smelting furnace.
At the witness rail, Noll Vey stood exactly where Dorn had left him: one stone hand flat upon the coping, his broken left shoulder gray and jagged against the lantern light. Down in the well, Lord Auditor Orin Vane sat behind his brass register, his face still the color of tallow after the reading of the Oakhaven order, staring at the floor between his boots.
