The contrast between the two sides gathered in the southern courtyard couldn’t have been starker. On one side stood the military might of the Cairn Host. Three hundred armored soldiers, heavy cavalry mounts with iron-studded barding, polished steel breastplates. A commander whose word had displaced entire highland clans. They possessed weapons, siege engines. The granaries that held the life of the valley in their iron grip.
On the other side stood four unarmored travelers from the lowlands. A twenty-four-year-old potter’s daughter in a patched wool coat with a deaf left ear. A nineteen-year-old ropewright with his broken hand bound in wooden splints. A deserting mountain guide with wire-bound repairs on her climbing staff. And a travelling healer carrying brass air lamps and linen bandages. They possessed neither steel nor power. They held only an iron sounding rod, a brass sighting rule. A leather-bound notebook filled with rag paper. Yet Kezra stepped forward onto the flat stone slabs. Then, it was the commander whose hand tightened nervously on his reins. It was the army that held its breath.
The assembly in the southern courtyard was thick with armed men when Kezra Venn walked back to the circular apron around the collapsed shaft. Word of the face-off had spread through the guard post like a spark through dry bracken. Sixty off-duty soldiers in quilted jacks and leather brigandines lined the barracks gallery. They watched from behind the timber railings, while Captain Hest Vale stood beside his mounted spear guards. His face was…
