Twenty-four men in a guardroom built for half that number made a particular kind of smell by the time the night reached its last hours. Cedd had stopped noticing it sometime after midnight, which was also about when he stopped trying to sleep.
He sat with his back to the east wall and his spear across his knees and worked through the same problem for the sixth or seventh time, reaching the same answer.
The treason annotation would reach the capital in the quarterly dispatch.
His mother was in Dunvarre. His brother was in Dunvarre. His three sisters had made decent marriages under the family name, and what a treason record did to a family name was not something he needed to think through in detail. It was obvious enough.
He was here because he had been posted here. He would rather not be doing this.
