Tabitha was, I believed, pleased to be out of her stall. Alexsander had the leisure hours with which to visit the mare, but I couldn’t recall if he took her out particularly often. He liked to walk, alone or with company. I let Tabitha set our pace for the most part, only pulling her up once to let a cart join the main thoroughfare. This cart was painted gaudy colours and full of autumn produce.

We crossed the animal-bridge and, for the first time since making my resolution, I glanced up at my destination. Fort Seeben, raw as any scar I’d seen in my days, offered no kind of welcome. At least the pyres were no longer burning.

I pulled Tabitha to a halt at the fork in the road, alongside the strange stone marker – the long-legged house, as I thought of it. Someone had left a modest bunch of wildflowers at its base. I pondered the gesture as we climbed the winding track through the trees. As an offering to the fort, for what had become of the soldiers, it was almost insultingly small – there should have been fields and fields of flowers for their fallen. Rather, it appeared a more personal act. Mrs Lehner had mentioned soldiers visiting the inn on rare occasions. I would ask the colonel, if I was permitted an audience, if any of his soldiers had been known to form… attachments with the citizens of Drekenford.

I was quite relieved to be alone on the track. The steady sound of Tabitha’s hoof beats echoed among the trees and went some way to dispel the eerie silence of those evergreens. I had to assume that all manner of beasts made a home of this forest but I had yet to see or hear any evidence of them myself. As far as I was concerned it was as dangerously barren and inhospitable as any desert, and it was this feeling that gripped me as the fort came into view. I understood, then, that the building of Fort Seeben was not just a kingdom’s attempt to defend itself, but an attempt to tame its own landscape.

Yet in a month’s time it would be more still: the staging post for an attempt to expand, to gain new lands to tame. The King’s mad grab for greater domain, greater glory, all in the name of Reikova. To my mind, the only possible outcome for such a campaign was disaster, and I did not need any biblical visions to see that. The very lands of the south resisted northern control or influence, let alone the people themselves. A small consolation: I would be back in Esteberg well before the campaign began in full. I was just a witness to the King’s opening manoeuvres.

The gates of the fort were closed. I was hailed by an unseen sentry, hidden somewhere along the wall despite the torches there. I gave my name and rank and requested an audience with the colonel. I was made to wait. It started to rain, which set the torches hissing and spitting; roughly the welcome I expected from the place.