The granite rotunda was growing colder as the core completed its slow rotation, settling into a low, droning hum that rattled the loose gravel in the radial expansion joints.
Alden Bram stood between Jon and the broken grille, his pry-bar planted firmly on the flagstones like an iron sentry post. His shaggy gray head shook with vehement, uncompromising disapproval.
“You’re letting a viper slip back into the ditch, Jon,” Bram growled, keeping his voice low but fierce. “She knows the drainage flue is open. She knows the ancient grille is broken. If she walks back into Marshal Ors’s command tent, she gives him the key to Harth’s belly. By tomorrow night, two companies of sappers with pickaxes will crawl through that brewery cellar and open the gates from behind our barricades. It’s fatal madness. In war, you kill the scout or you dig your own grave.”
Iven stood against the granite pilaster, her fingers clutching the canvas strap of her empty surveyor’s pouch. She did not argue or plead. Her gray eyes moved between the two men, waiting with the fatalistic stillness of a soldier whose life hung on an innkeeper’s whim. She knew the military code as well as Bram did; border scouts who fell behind town walls were never given quarter.
