Chapter 2: The General Comes Down from the Ridge

The horses came before the men.

Elwin heard them first through the relay station's eastern wall — a sound he recognized not from military experience but from six months on the eastern marches, riding alongside a man who never traveled slowly enough for the terrain to be comfortable. A particular rhythm, urgent without panic, covering ground because the ground needed covering. He set down his pen.

By the time he reached the doorway, the company was already entering the station's yard: twelve riders, frontier guard by their dun cloaks and the road-grime that had migrated into the weave of everything they owned. They handled their horses with the automatic competence of people who had stopped noticing they were doing it. The rain had softened to a mist that made the torches each rider carried burn with a diffuse, orange-grey light, and in that light the station yard looked briefly like a painting of itself, slightly unreal, slightly too symbolic.