The walk from the paymaster’s porch across the frozen bailey to Marshal Solvan Krail’s ground-floor office took less than two minutes. But the tension trailing in Captain Hest Vale’s wake was as sharp as broken slate.
Behind them, the eighty pikemen of the first company remained standing in their ranks, their boots rooted to the frosted cobbles. Meanwhile, their officers watched them from the steps. Word of the face-off had already spread along the barracks wall. Wagon drivers lashing oats sacks onto baggage wagons had stopped their work, their hands resting on the hemp ties. They watched the young land-mapper from Kilnstep follow Captain Hest through the heavy oak doors of the keep.
Krail’s office was stripped of all decorative pretense, resembling the working tent of an army on active campaign. A massive frame stand desk of plain, scrubbed pine occupied the center, laden with grain registers, baggage manifests, iron scale-weights, and ink-stained ledgers from three seasons of mountain occupation. Behind the desk, the grey morning light through the high, narrow embrasure lit up the dull steel rivets of Krail’s brigandine.
Host Cartographer Ulvan Dret sat on a low bench near the hearth, leaning his weight upon an ash cane, his swollen knuckles wrapped around a tin mug of hot chicory water.
