At noon on Day 144, the winter sun stood directly overhead. It cast short, dark shadows across the outer gatehouse barrier of Stonewake Citadel.
The civilian escape was moving through the outer gatehouse in an orderly stream. Women from the castle laundry carried bundles of clean linens on their heads, while basin carriers sent up by Adra Pike helped push heavy carts loaded with flour sacks, dried roots, and copper cooking kettles down the slope. Near the white boundary flags marking the southern edge of the 1,024-pace square, three Host soldiers in buff leather jerkins stood beside a two-wheeled handcart piled high with copper wash-tubs and bundles of woolen blankets.
One of them was a young archer named Corin, barely twenty years old, whose sister Megan had worked in the citadel laundry for two long winters. The other two were cousins, pikemen named Hal and Tomas from Company Three, whose father operated a small timber-hauling wagon on the lower mountain road.
Kezra Venn dropped the low roof wall steps and approached the barrier with Paxa Sel and Fellis Dain.
Megan stood in the dirt beside the boundary stone. He had her flour-dusted hands planted firmly on her hips, her eyes flashing with furious elder-sister anger as she stared at her younger brother.
