The underground chamber remained dead quiet except for the hiss of the animal fat torches and the slow drip of water from the kitchen drain forty paces back along the drift. Yseld Arken stood beside the central hearth. Her hooked climbing staff was held casually across her front, her grey eyes meeting Marshal Krail’s gaze with the steady, fearless familiarity of an old soldier who knew the regulations as thoroughly as any staff officer.
Krail regarded her for three long seconds. He recognized her, of course. Yseld had been a senior scouting scout in his third mountain cohort before she had vanished during the winter retreat across the Blackglass ridges five years earlier. In the Cairn Host, desertion was technically punishable by death. But Krail was a pragmatist who never spent blood where a contract could be bought. He knew why she had left. An entire baggage train of displaced valley families had frozen on the high pass. That was because an adjutant had promised them shelter that never existed.
“You always had a clerk’s care about written orders, Arken,” Krail said, his voice dry as cracked slate. “Even when you were leading patrol files through the snow.”
“In your company, Marshal,” Yseld answered without dropping her gaze, “a soldier who marches on a spoken promise usually finds that his burial detail was budgeted before his rations. If Mistress Venn is to give you an approved castle, these thirty-four miners and the fifty-seven courtyard workers need a benchmark that can’t…
