The narrow southwestern service back gate groaned on its heavy iron straps as Corporal Brand drew back the top bolt with a muffled grunt. The timber door was barely five feet tall, built of rough-split fir boards heavy with thick iron bands, designed solely to allow camp sweepers to empty the ash-barrows and dung tubs into the southern disposal gullies without dragging refuse through the main outer gatehouse gate.
“Mind your footing out there, Master Dain,” Brand cautioned. He held the half-open door against his shoulder while keeping his free hand on his short sword. “The upkeep ledge isn’t more than five or six paces wide before it rolls over into the boulder fields of the southern slope. If you slip in the frost, you’ll slide fifty yards down into the scrub juniper.”
“I have spent four years surveying mountain shale, Corporal,” Fellis replied, ducking his head beneath the low top door beam and stepping through into the biting mountain air. “I know how to keep my center over my boots.”
Kezra and Yseld followed closely behind him. She stepped out onto the narrow, frost-crusted upkeep lane that ran along the outside base of the low southwestern service wall.
Above them, the castle wall rose forty feet into the pale afternoon sky, its massive hard speckled granite cut stone blocks weathered by hundreds of years of highland sleet. But down here on the outside terrace, the ground was wilder, rougher. Then it untamed by guard post stonework.
