The silence beneath the dark rock overhang stretched long and heavy, filled only with the dry, rhythmic ticking of cooling rock as the afternoon shadow lengthened across the floor.
Kezra Venn closed the Bonded Survey Notebook. The thick pigskin cover shut with a soft, decisive thud that echoed off the rock ribs. She looked at Yseld Arken, angling her good right ear toward the scout, her expression unreadable.
“And what did you do after you saw the five bodies behind the forge shop, Yseld?” Kezra asked. Her voice was calm, steady, and free of the sharp anger that still hummed in Paxa’s stance. “Did you take your sergeant’s chevron?”
Yseld let out a short, jagged breath that sounded almost like a sob, though her eyes remained dry and hard as flint.
“I went to the regimental headquarters at Splitflint,” Yseld said. “I didn’t take off my boots, I didn’t wash the dust from my neck. I didn’t go to the mess tent. I walked straight past the sentries at the inner wooden wall and into Major Kroll’s command pavilion.”
She gestured with her right hand, mimicking the motion of throwing papers onto a field table.
“I took the carbon duplicate of the routing voucher from my tunic—the copy with my split-tail stamp and the false notation about the escape. I took the delivery receipts from the Gallowgate quarrymaster that showed eight hundred registered workers were in the tents on the morning of the thirteenth. And I laid them on Kroll’s…
