The next day came fast and so was the order of business.
The reassignment briefing lasted forty minutes and resolved nothing that felt urgent into anything that felt useful.
They sat in rows in the knight post's main hall, twenty-three of the surviving recruits from their group, the others having been redistributed to different posts or retained at Harrowfield, and a senior administrator with ink-stained fingers read their assignments from a ledger with the look of someone who had been delivering news of varying quality all morning and had stopped registering the difference.
Castle garrison. Interior patrol. Rotating watch on the eastern and northern gates.
Not the front. Not the border positions where Arthur's forces were pressing against the kingdom's skin. The castle.
Noah listened to his name read out and the assignment attached to it and thought about the Ardenmere pass twenty miles north sitting empty.
