In the cold, grey mist that pooled along the northern cliffs of Alderfast an hour before dawn on Day 146, six men in blackened leather jerkins slipped away from the outer refusal bivouac.
They didn’t carry the ten-foot ash pikes of the line companies or the heavy, brass-bound pavises of the castle guard. They had stripped their equipment down to what moved quietly through the rocks. Short iron arming swords bound in greased wool sword sheaths so the fittings wouldn’t clink, curved skinning daggers tucked into boot tops, and strips of oiled leather wound around the buckles of their harness. At their head walked Sergeant Vane. Not the cohort commander who had ridden the castle into the north. But his younger cousin, a bitter thirty-year-old logistics sergeant who had spent the night watching the campfires of the seventy-four refusers burn low in the ditch.
Vane knew the arithmetic of the refusal camp better than anyone. He had spent three years in Krail’s headquarters counting silver crowns and logging supply wagons. He knew that the twenty-five silver crowns Krail had paid each refuser yesterday would buy four months of bread in the river towns and little else. A discharge with twenty-five silver coins was an honorable exit for an aging pikeman who had an orchard waiting in the lowlands, but for an ambitious supply boss who had dreamed of controlling the toll ledgers of the North Market crossroads, it was a humiliating pittance. But the book—the thick, brass-clasped quarto volume bound…
