Sunset reddened the jagged snow peaks above the Spine. Then, casting long purple shadows across the courtyard of Stonewake Citadel, Paxa Sel sat in the guard post clerk’s office beneath two smoking animal fat lamps.
The office was a narrow, vaulted stone chamber lined with cedar shelves that smelled of old sheepskin thick parchment, dark oak-ink, and dry turnip dust. Spread across the battered oak table were the master military rolls of the Cairn Host guard post, detailed lists of commissary rations, and Paxa’s own independent census of every household, workshop, and back kitchen inside the castle walls. Paxa held a polished bone metal pen in her right hand, her sharp dark eyes scanning every line of faded brown ink with careful skepticism.
Military clerks, accustomed to the office shorthand of feudal armies, habitually treated backup workers, camp followers, wagon drivers’ boys, and back kitchen maids not as distinct civilian inhabitants. But as backup rations attached to single fighting companies. To a supply boss balancing a flour ledger, a baker’s apprentice was merely a half-ration draw under Company Two. To the class safeguard of mapmaking, however, that apprentice was a living human soul whose presence would instantly invalidate an unconsented exchange.
