Abruptly, he realized that he was not having to fight down despair. The anger remained, but it was cold as steel in winter, now, and he could not detect a single drop of the hopelessness that had threatened to drown him before. There were ten thousand algai’d’siswai in that camp, and five hundred women who could channel—Gallenne had the right of it; prepare for the worst, and all your surprises were pleasant ones—five hundred women who would not hesitate to use the Power as a weapon; Faile was hidden like one snowflake in a meadow covered with snow, but when you piled up so much, there just was no point in despair. You had to buckle down or be plowed under. Besides, he could see the puzzle, now. Nat Torfinn had always said any puzzle could be solved, once you found out where to push and where to pull.

To the north and south, the land had been cleared farther from the city than the rise where he lay. Scattered farmhouses, none with smoke rising from its chimney, dotted the landscape, and rail fences marked out fields beneath the snow, but more than a handful of men trying to approach from either direction might as well carry torches and banners and blow trumpets. There seemed to be a road leading roughly south through the farms and another roughly north. Useless to him, probably, but you never could tell. Jondyn might bring back some information about the city, though what good that would do when the city was in the middle of the Shaido, he could not begin to guess. Gaul and the Maidens who were making their way around the camp would be able to tell him what lay beyond the next ridge. A saddle in that ridge had the look of a road heading somewhere east. Oddly, a cluster of windmills stood maybe a mile north of the saddle, long white arms turning slowly, and there appeared to another group of windmills atop the next rise beyond. A row of arches, like a long narrow bridge, stretched down the slope from the nearest windmills all the way to the city walls.

“Does anybody know what that is?” he asked, pointing. Studying it through the looking glass told him nothing except that it seemed made of the same gray stone as the wall. The thing was much too narrow for a bridge. It lacked side walls, and there did not seem to be anything for a bridge to cross.