Fifty paces east of the cart yard. There, the damp limestone cobbles of the village lane broadened into the communal wellhead, the silence of the morning broke with the sharp crack of iron striking stone.
Yseld Arken planted the heavy forged metal ring of her hooked climbing staff squarely between two frost-heaved paving slabs.
She stood alone in the center of the lane, her feet shoulder-width apart. Her woolen traveled cloak pinned back over her left shoulder in the severe, angular style of a Cairn Host frontier scout. In her gloved right hand, she didn’t hold a drawn blade, a hunting bow, or a sling. She held a long sheet of stiff, yellowed thick parchment, rolled on an ash dowel and sealed with two thick wafers of dark green merchant’s wax.
“Halt the post and stand to the ledger!” Yseld called out.
The voice that came from her throat was not the cautious, dry murmur of a mountain guide leading travelers through the bitter salt passes. It was the clipped, ringing, parade-ground bark of a senior company route officer. A voice forged in eight years of calling roll across muddy drill squares and shouting baggage wagons through freezing river fords. It had that precise, nasal bite that every enlisted man in Marshal Krail’s army had heard in his ears since the day he took the recruit’s oath.
