By the time a tavern story crosses three cobbled lanes in Mere, it generally grows two extra heads and a coat of mail, and Sella Rusk had spent enough years in the Survey service to recognize the tracks of a lie before she reached the market well.
She had gone down into town an hour after sunrise to collect three secondhand willow bucklers from the cooper’s yard and meet the three beginners who had paid her two copper pence apiece to learn how to walk a dungeon corridor without breaking their own collarbones. Before she had even strapped the bucklers to her pack-frame, the cooper’s apprentice asked her whether it was true that the wool buyer Doss had crawled out of the hill fort at dusk with his waistcoat split by a falling broadsword and four enchanted loaves in his hat.
At the iron market well, where the weavers’ girls were filling their cedar buckets, the broadsword had become a row of nine iron halberds worked by clockwork beneath the floor.
By the time Sella met Kip, Bess, and Fennik outside the old grain-weighing shed at the foot of the hill track, the nine halberds had turned into the ghosts of nine belted knights from the First Border Muster who stood in full plate behind a wall of black glass and broke the shins of any delver who stepped on the wrong flagstone.
