Captain Hest Vale sat her chestnut mare with the relaxed, spotless stance of a royal judge head over a boundary hearing.
The four mounted troopers behind her formed a solid line of iron and wool across the cart ruts, their horses spaced at exact two-pace intervals, their hands resting on the pommels of their heavy cavalry broadswords. Up on the fiery bluff behind the roofless toll booth, the two light skirmishers had settled behind a shelf of dark stone, the steel prods of their light crossbows reflecting the morning sun through the sparse juniper scrub.
The dry morning wind pushed a fine drift of red fiery dust across the cart ruts, sifting through the spokes of the derelict toll cart and dusting the dark sheepskin of Yseld’s jerkin.
From where Kezra stood beside the pack mule’s shoulder, the spatial shape of the face-off was as clear as a line inked on rag parchment. The road here was barely four paces wide, hemmed in on the right by the collapsed stone retaining wall of the drainage ditch and on the left by the sheer, twenty-foot dark rock cliff that backed the ruined booth.
The four cavalry troopers behind Captain Vale sat their mounts with the relaxed, iron-clad certainty of men who had won twenty such standoffs without drawing steel. Their heavy broadswords remained in their greased sword sheaths. But their right hands hovered within two inches of the wire-wrapped handles. Their bay geldings were spaced so that no pedestrian could squeeze…
