The afternoon light faded into cold blue twilight across the tool house yard as Yseld Arken sat on an upturned timber baulk, a small piece of chalk in her hand. She drew the layout of Stonewake’s gatehouse on a flat slab of limestone. Marn and Tella knelt beside her, their faces lit up by the yellow glow of an oil lantern hung from a beam.
Yseld’s voice was low, flat, and stripped of all self-pity. For three years, since her desertion from the Cairn Host, she had carried the shame of her former service like a hidden knife. Now, under the binding terms of the payback agreement she had made with the expedition in Hushwood, she laid out the reality of that service as a protective weapon for the people she had once helped oppress.
“Four years ago, before I deserted,” Yseld said, her chalk tracing the two heavy square towers flanking the drop-gate, “I was a route-finder and scout for Krail’s third mountain company. We were ordered to clear the eastern pass above the salt flats—seventeen families of quarry workers who had refused to pay the winter toll.”
She didn’t look up from the stone, but her hand was rock-steady. “Krail didn’t send soldiers with drawn swords to slaughter them in their beds. That’s not how he operates. He simply ordered our company to advance the boundary markers two miles west, declaring their spring well-head to be part of the castle military reservation. Then he posted four archers on…
