The southern river quays of Crown-Reach were shrouded in a cold, slate-gray drizzle that slicked the granite mooring stones. Then it turned the trampled mud of the loading docks into greasy black paste. For three hundred paces along the waterfront, twelve hundred mercenary soldiers—foreign lancers from the Brabant Marches, crossbowmen from the Iron-Hold hills, and armored pikemen in blackened iron corselets—stood in three long, silent columns under the watchful crossbows of the Municipal Citizen Watch.
At the head of the central pier, beneath a temporary canopy of oiled tarpaulin, sat the demobilization commission. High Marshal Vance sat in an iron folding chair. He was flanked by Sile Rook and forty veteran draymen who held their six-foot ash-wood packing bats across their chests. On the table before them lay sixty wooden crates filled with approved travel passports stamped by the King’s Bench, ten thousand hard-baked travel biscuits in burlap bags, and sixty barrels of salt pork.
Beside the table, Tomas Reed stood with his hands resting upon his ash-wood pack frame. His woolen smock was soaked through at the shoulders. The cold autumn damp made the deep scar on his left forearm stiffen like cold leather beneath his buckled calfskin brace. He adjusted the lower brass strap, feeling the rigid support stabilize his weakened wrist. For nine years, he had unloaded barrels of salt herring and pig iron on these same quays. Watching twelve hundred armed hired blades surrender their weapons on the very stones where common wagon drivers had been…
