The silence in the yard trench was not empty stone; it was the suspended hush that follows a dropped sledgehammer before iron strikes the anvil.
Across the grey clay heap, young Fen stood with his heels pressed against rotted ditch timber, his knuckles bunched in his linen healer’s apron. He stared at the tall skeleton in the canvas hood as though thirty years of border history had grown teeth and stood up in the mud.
“You held the bolt,” Fen whispered, his voice thin and dry. “When the provost’s troopers threw torches onto the roof straw... you stood at the main postern and kept the crowd inside.”
Sergeant Berr did not turn his skull away. The rusted iron rim of his burgonet cast a wedge of black shadow across his eye-sockets, but the yellow bone of his cheek was fixed straight on the boy.
“I held the bolt,” Berr said, his jawbone clicking with a dry millstone rasp. “Captain’s order. Contain the holding until royal commission arrives. We heard carts coming up from Mere at dusk and thought it was the grain wagons. It wasn’t grain. It was six barrels of pitch and forty archers from High Wyche with oiled rags on their points. When fire took the stable thatch, Corporal Baird shouted that the roof was going. I told him to stay on the gate.”
