Brack Bridge

The Bridge had not moved. Corin had known it would not and it was still a thing to see: two stone arches over the Brack water where the valley narrowed, and the fort on the north bank above them, square, with the wall he had walked at night for two years and the gate he had ridden out of on the first morning with fifty-one men and a map.

He read it as he came, because there was nothing else to do with his eyes. The sentry on the gate was a new one. The sentry on the wall above him was not; that was the sergeant’s old place, and the man in it stood the way the sergeant had stood, which meant the sergeant had trained him, which meant the sergeant was alive and had not been on a rope, and Corin had written the sentence that had kept…