Dawn came over the eastern ridge as a thin, grease-pale smear behind the birch scrub, cold enough to stiffen the mud in the cart ruts before the sun had cleared the trees.
Tessa Dene stood in the sunken corner of the outer courtyard with her split boot braced on the shoulder of Sella Rusk’s iron spade, watching the east window of the Grand Hall catch the first slant of morning light. From the outside, the window looked like nothing grander than a salvaged bull’s-eye pane wedged into rough fieldstone with fresh lime putty. Yet as the sun tipped the ridge, the glass drank the grey daybreak and threw a narrow, ruler-straight line of blue-amber light across the wet nettles, ending right at the stake Sella had driven into the rubble the evening before.
“Well,” Tessa said, blowing on her chapped knuckles before tucking her thumbs beneath the leather apron strings at her waist. “Either your magic window keeps good hours, Noll, or the sun in this valley has started working for the Survey.”
From the mortar crack beside the inner threshold stone—twenty paces back, right where the dungeon’s five-room reach stopped at the open courtyard arch—Noll Vey’s voice drifted out in a dry, theatrical murmur that carried poorly once it left his own masonry.
