Vesna Coldhand

aka Watch-Captain Coldhand, the forward watch

Bron Coldhand's sister and the Broken Lances' watch-captain at the Foldfast Steading, posted forward of Hewngate to keep a log of everything that crosses the castle-road fork and to hold the watch until the sixth hour.

Where her brother Bron holds the stolen gate at Hewngate and makes a business of it, Vesna keeps the watch, and thinks that makes her the cleaner Coldhand. She camped the standing walls of the dead Foldfast steading because it faces the fork where the Vale gives way toward the castle road, and someone who is not quite House Vandahl is paying the Broken to write down every soul, cart, and outlander that passes it. She does not ask why; the coin comes sealed with a hand almost the House's own, and a Lance who reads too far up a chain does not stay paid. She has filled a watch-log with bearings and hours and one word underlined in every entry — still coming — and she has orders she will not discuss beyond a phrase: hold to the sixth hour. She keeps the feral steading-dogs off her squad with scraps and the cellar's ash-hounds behind a barred door and a horn, and she has written the outlander who keeps turning up at the Vale's delves into her log four times now. She expects to be relieved before whatever she is waiting for arrives. She is wrong about that, the way the whole family is wrong about being clean.

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