The wall was a wreck. Stones tumbled everywhere from a V-shaped gap that went all the way down to the ground. Abi and the other three Masters stared at it. Jicks tilted her head to the side. “Looks like a siege engine hit it, except there’s no sign of battering on the downed stones,” she observed, and moved closer to the breech to examine the fallen stones more closely.

Master Vance turned to Benjon. “What happened here?” he asked.

Benjon sniffed. It was very clear that he didn’t trust them at all, no matter what his master had said. Abi suspected that he expected them to know exactly what had gone wrong.

But he answered anyway.

“The wall developed a crack we were unable to stop,” he said. “Your Valdemarans—”

“They weren’t ours and weren’t from Valdemar,” Padrick interrupted him, eyes flashing.

Benjon sniffed dismissively. “The strangers then—said they could fix the wall overnight. They painted something on it, and left, telling us that the wall would be healed in the morning. In the middle of the night, there was a clamor, and this is what we found.”

Padrick, Beyrn, and Vance stared at each other. “I don’t—” Master Vance began.

“I do,” said Jicks. She came back to the group. “You’re an idiot,” she said to Benjob bluntly. “I’ll bet your own stoneworkers told you there was no way to repair a crack like that by painting something on the stone. I know exactly what happened. What got painted all over the mortar was plain old water. And what brought the wall down was simple magic. Someone snuck back here in the middle of the night and rapidly froze and thawed the water in the mortar with magic until the mortar crumbled and the wall fell apart. And these Valdemarans don’t have magic.”

Benjon gaped at her. “But . . . but . . . but . . .”

“It’s a trick our Mage-engineers in Hanson’s Harriers like to use in a siege if they can, though usually they can’t get close enough to a wall to work the trick. And usually, they don’t get off enough freezing and thawing cycles fast enough to do more than weaken the wall for the engines. But I’ve seen it done and more than once.” She gave Benjon a gimlet eye. “Bet you didn’t ask these tricksters for their credentials from the King, did you? Bet you just took their word for it, didn’t you?”

Benjon got stony-faced. “I’m not privy to that information.”

“Of course you aren’t.” Jicks snorted. “So eager to get repairs made for nothing, you couldn’t hand the keys to the castle over fast enough. Well, now Masters, what do you want?”