With two or three days to spare, Little Knife decided to do something. He couldn't waste this precious window.
Marlow's finger left a streak of sweat across the parchment ledger. He stared down at the figures on the page, his gaze fixed and vacant.
The chill peculiar to castles curled around his knees, but the shirt against his chest was already soaked with cold sweat.
The candle cast a dim glow from its bronze stand on the desk, throwing a shadow behind Marlow that resembled a hanged man.
"The Seventh Company, Second Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment of the Republic requires four hundred pounds of hard cheese... It still hasn't arrived."
Marlow tapped his quill against the final figure again and again. Specks of ink dotted the page like sesame seeds on a Shandong flatbread.
Outside the window, the sky above Casro's mountain ridges was only just turning pale, yet he had already checked the list three times... Besides that cheese, they were still short a full twenty-five sacks of flour, six crates of cheese, and assorted quantities of salted meat.
That shortfall was enough to send two hundred Musketeers mutinying on empty stomachs during the march. Or worse, the hands they used to load their guns might pick up stones and smash the quartermaster's skull... His own skull, in other words.
Just then, the clatter of iron boots sounded on the stone steps outside the room.
Marlow instinctively slammed the ledger shut. On its coarse linen cover, the words "Shield tax collection records, year 1525 of the Earth Mother Goddess calendar" flickered in the candlelight.
The collection order delivered by fast horse from Votradnoi ten days earlier still lay at the bottom of the pile. Its ornate lettering tightened around Marlow's throat like a noose.
"...The three towns of