Dawn broke across the serrated castle walls of Stonewake Citadel in thin, grey level bands the color of cold lead. Frost rimed the iron tyre-bands of the siege wagons parked along the western curtain. The smell of boiled turnips and stale coal smoke drifted down from the upper barracks chimneys into the lowest service courtyard. Kezra Venn knelt on the freezing flags beside a recessed drainage nook beneath the western retaining wall, her knees cushioned only by the folded hem of her wool-lined coat. The stone beneath her palm felt numbingly dense, but against the inner knuckles of her right hand. There, the skin was chapped from four days of handling cold brass dividers, a faint, rhythmic pulse of moving air brushed like a feather.
The official military foundation plan supplied by Cairn Host Cartographer Ulvan Dret lay rolled in its stiff calfskin case three paces behind her. The chart, signed with the Marshal’s heavy wax seal and bearing three elaborate flourish lines beneath the title block, marked this entire western foundation sector as an unbroken mass of columnar dark rock. A massive stone bedrock footing that supposedly extended eighty paces west into the mountain spine without a single cavity or load-bearing fissure. Yet Kezra unpinned the small animal fat candle from her wooden field kit and struck a spark to its wick. Then, shielding the pale yellow flame behind her curved palm, the wick didn’t stand upright in the still courtyard chill.
