The Shoulder

The Lowcross bell rang at two in the morning on the nineteenth night, and it did not stop.

Ilse was awake. She had been awake since midnight at the library desk with her certification, copying it for the third time in her best hand, because a thing that was going to be read aloud in front of a Justice should not have a single blot on it. She heard the bell first as a wrongness in the silence, a tiny iron sound four miles away, and then the watch on the east wall took it up with the horn, three long and three short, and the keep woke around her like a hand closing.

By the time she reached the yard it was full of torches and horses and Varro, in her shirt and a mail coat and no cloak, shouting orders in a voice Ilse had never heard her…