From the shadowed loft above the Lantern’s covered wood-shed, the world smelled of seasoned split pine, dry bark, and cobwebs. Iven lay flat upon her stomach on a bed of sweet-smelling cedar shavings, her chin resting on her crossed forearms, peering through an open knot-hole in the horizontal siding boards.
She had not slept in thirty-six hours. Her shoulders were stiff, her soaked leather jerkin cold against her ribs, but her scout’s discipline kept her body as still as an uncocked crossbow. In the imperial cavalry, a soldier who fell asleep on observation duty was tied to a wagon wheel and flogged with knotted hemp until the skin flayed from his back; after eight years of frontier patrols, her senses had learned to hunt through exhaustion.
Below her, twenty feet across the narrow brick courtyard, the rear scullery door of the inn stood propped open with an iron kettle-weight to let out the steam of early baking.
Gray dawn light was creeping over the high garden wall, illuminating the small square room where Elin Hale was at work.
Iven watched the innkeeper’s wife through the knot-hole. She had spent a lifetime studying officers and their women. In the imperial camps, the wives and mistresses of high commanders wore silk pelisses trimmed with gray squirrel fur, dabbing lavender water behind their ears to drown the stench of the latrine trenches, their voices shrill as they ordered conscripts to carry brass bathtubs and silver vanity mirrors through the mud. They looked upon…
