The cold river wind whipped the skirts of Iven’s faded leather scout coat against her calves, carrying the sharp, greasy reek of burning thatch and river mud.
She stood with her soft-soled scout boots planted firmly on the lead flashing of the weavers’ hall roof-ridge, thirty feet above the cobblestones of the market square. Her balance was effortless, born of six winters scouting the treacherous shale crags of the northern frontier. Her eyes swept the slate gables, the chimneys weeping white woodsmoke, and the empty, rain-slick square below.
She remembered the willow ditch. In the tenth cycle, when her boots had been swallowed by the peat bog at Low Sike, an innkeeper named Jon Hale had pulled her from the mire with his bare hands. He had not driven a dagger through her eye. He had given her dry woolen socks, half a loaf of dark caraway rye, and the missing half of her company map. He had treated an enemy scout not as an imperial target to be butchered, but as a living traveler entitled to hospitality. That night, sitting by the peat fire in the cellar of the River Lantern, she had learned the difference between an imperial war engine and an honest community of free men.
