Chapter 10: Brenys Cole's Militia and Thessaly's March

The morning Thessaly's people began to move, the smell reached the checkpoint before the sound did.

Brenys Cole had learned to read crowds by smell in the years she'd spent working the Flea Bottom night patrols, before the burning took both the Flea Bottom and the need for night patrols and replaced them with this — everything replaced by this. Crowds that smelled of sweat and fear moved quickly and without direction. Crowds that smelled of sweat and purpose moved in columns, and their footfalls had a rhythm that wasn't quite military but wasn't quite not.

She was at the eastern boundary marker, reviewing the morning's forage tallies with a militiaman named Orvyn, when the smell came off the wind. Charcoal and unwashed wool and something beneath it, almost floral, like dried herbs bundled for the fire. She put down the tally slate.