The iron grating bit half an inch deeper into Kezra Venn’s right shoulder as twelve stone of cavalry soldier bore down through the sole of his boot.
The pain was a white-hot lance that shot down her collarbone into her chest bone and radiated across her ribs. Her spine bowed under the sudden squeezing. Her knees ground into the glass-fused brick floor until the skin over her kneecaps tore against the gritty mortar.
She didn’t cry out. She didn’t yield an inch.
Through the two-inch cross-hatched iron lattice directly above her nose, the sole of the corporal’s left marching boot was close enough that she could smell the rancid sheep fat on the welt and see black fiery sand wedged between the iron nail-heads. Every breath the soldier took made the timber floorboards creak with a slow, heavy rhythm that shook straight through Kezra’s teeth.
Eighteen inches away, resting on the pine workbench above the edge of the unpinned grating, her bonded survey notebook lay exposed beside an empty tin grease pot.
Every desperate instinct in Kezra’s blood urged her to act.
The pins were out. The grate was free of its frame. If she surged upward with her legs, threw the twenty-pound iron casting into the soldier’s shins. Then she lunged across the planks, her fingers could close around the waxed leather cover before he could draw his saber. It was the same reckless impulse that had nearly gotten Fellis shot on the Blackglass ridge. The belief that unearned…
