The Summer Posting

Ashfall Academy, book 4

Sixty days on the book. Thirty-four in the store. Forty to midsummer.

Summer. Cinder Company is posted to the Breach, a river fort sixty miles east of Ashfall, where ash has lain three times this spring on the stones below the water gate. Relief comes up the Callow road on midsummer day: the summer convoy and two companies of pike. Corvin Hale counts the days without meaning to. Forty. He has counted to a relief once before, on another river.

Colonel Lowrie asked three times for a stores company. He got a school: thirty support cadets, Captain Isolde Rook on his river-front walls, and Senna Thorne at a forge that has gone cold.

The fort's store book says sixty days at full ration for fifteen hundred, every delivery "received in full." Corvin counts it anyway, sack by sack. Behind a face of good flour, row after row of crown sacks hold sand. The true figure is thirty-four days.

And the river is falling a month early. In the colonel's gauge book, in ink gone brown: "Six, the boats. Four, the Hollows." By the gauge, the river goes under four feet four days before the relief is due. A dead Hollow against the stakes below the ford says they are already measuring it.

In his coat is a letter about the convoy that never reached Kell's Ford. It says nothing about the Breach. He keeps it in the pocket, and he counts.

He knows how to make a store last and how to wait for relief. At Kell's Ford he did both, for forty days. The convoy never came.

Book 4 of the Ashfall Academy series, a men's adventure academy LitRPG. It stands alone: a complete story with its own ending, and the series arc continues in book 5. Slow-burn, closed-door romance (no explicit scenes): the harem builds across the series. All characters are adults.

Coming soon to Amazon.