Chapter 6: The Fall of Cinderspire

The assault began before dawn, while the stars above Mount Ashen still held their positions with the indifference of things that have watched too many armies move beneath them.

Wren heard the signal horns from the supply column where she had spent the final pre-assault hour verifying the evacuation routes she'd drawn three weeks ago in a different country, before Ashgate, before she had begun writing certain things in the main record rather than the margins. The horns were not the triumphant kind. They were the working kind—three short, one long, three short—the sequence Caedric had established at Vethmark to mean *we are beginning what we came here to do* and nothing more ceremonial than that.

She picked up her satchel and followed the sound.