For a long breath, the only sound in the courtyard was the drip of thaw-water falling from the broken gutter into the nettles by the well.
Sergeant Berr stood straight at the edge of the clay trench, his notched scabbard planted upright beside his ankle-bones like a pike on parade. He did not lean on the iron chape, and he did not pull Hobb’s canvas tarp forward to shadow his empty eye sockets from the morning sun.
“There were no raiders,” Sergeant Berr said.
His gravelly voice carried flat and clear across the twenty paces to Noll’s doorway seam.
“When I climbed through your floor four days ago and spoke to the clerk,” the dead sergeant continued, “I gave you the wording from our detachment order-book: Three hundred valley residents held in protective garrison custody pending the arrival of the southern relief column. Every corporal in the company signed that line in the morning log. We knew it was ink-wash before the ink dried.”
Beside the flat boulder, Prit picked up his white filing chalk and held it poised over a fresh slate, waiting. Sella Rusk stood with her arms folded over her quilted vest, her boots planted wide in the wet grass, while Tessa Dene and Fen remained near the trench rim—Fen still holding his right wrist against his apron where the bell’s vibration had shaken him.
