The eastern curtain wall of Stonewake Citadel caught the first thin, level shafts of morning sunlight. That turned the damp limestone cut stone from the dull grey of wet lead to a pale, bone-white glare.
Instead of following Captain Hest Vale directly up the broad central stairway to the keep, Kezra turned sharply to the left at the inner bailey arch, leading her team along the cobbled outer edge lane toward the eastern boundary line.
‘The Marshal is expecting you in the war room, Venn,’ Hest Vale called out, halting at the foot of the keep stairs with her hand on her saber handle knob.
‘The Marshal can wait fifteen minutes, Captain,’ Kezra answered without pausing. Her boots rang sharply against the frost-rimed cobbles. ‘A map maker doesn’t look at charts in a warm room before she verifies the ground under her boots. If your builders left a single iron tie-rod anchored across the boundary plane, or if that footing trench is backfilled with loose silt, my notebook will reject the entire eastern quarter before sunset. I will see the stone first.’
Ulvan Dret, hobbling behind them with his sighting rule stand tucked under his arm, nodded once toward Hest Vale. A quick, nervous gesture that signaled the captain to yield. Even a royal field officer understood that arguing with a land-mapper over a boundary line was like arguing with a stone mason over the plumb of a foundation wall. The stone answered only to gravity, not to military seniority.
