Jon Hale broke the pinch of pine-resin sealing the waxed oilskin square and flattened Scout Iven’s dispatch against the oak lectern beside the Town Ledger. The note had been written with the charred tip of a fire-hardened birch twig on the back of a torn commissary ration voucher, the letters slanted and urgent from being braced against a saddle-bow in the woods.
Elin, Sister Oda, Lady Signe Lorr, and Sir Cael leaned in around Jon’s shoulders as he read the dispatch aloud to the market square:
Fourth Bell minus forty minutes, High Alder Ridge. The charcoal-stamped safe-conduct passes we left at the spring-head did their work before noon. Forty camp-follower families—blacksmiths’ wives, wheelwrights, laundresses, and seventy children—along with thirty pressed ox-carters from the southern shires cut the picket-ropes on the rear baggage corral when Warden Brecht’s provosts marched down to the bridge battery. They could not take the main valley road because General Ors has six hundred heavy foot camped across the milestone causeway. I am guiding them on foot through the high peat-cuttings toward the old gravel ford fifty yards above the North Weir. We will reach the east bank of the ford at the fifth bell of dawn tomorrow (Day 4). Ors’s provost-cavalry discovered the empty corral twenty minutes ago; two squadrons of light lancers are sweeping the ridge trails behind us. If the river over the gravel spit is not dropped below knee-depth when the fifth bell tolls, the women and the slow wagons cannot cross before…
