(Commander Renn POV)
Since the night we arrived at Halden, I had doubled the watch on the west.
The west had been quiet. I doubled it anyway, because quiet is what the west always is right up until it isn't, and because I had been given a princess, four other children and a treaty, and I wanted to be able to say afterwards that I had watched every approach to Halden twice.
I could say it. I had. It had made no difference at all, and that was the problem I had been carrying for four days.
A mistake, I know what to do with. You find it, you name it, you put a man or a rule where it was, and you make sure it doesn't happen twice. I had gone looking for my mistake every night since the eleventh, and I hadn't found one. My guards had stood where I put them. The hold had gone up when it should. The runner had run. Every procedure I had was sound.
And every one of them rested on the same thing: that a man can see what he's guarding.
***
