There were other signs; more ominous signs. The countryside was empty. It was empty, because insofar as it was possible to get the people to leave, it had been evacuated. There wasn’t a sheep on the hillsides, or a farmer in the fields. The fields that no longer held sheep did hold something else, grazing on the rich, emerald grass, grass that the Tedrels desired for their own herds. The horses, the oxen, the mules of the army grazed there—not the horses of the cavalry, which were kept within the camp, but the horses that drew the carts that supplied the army, the horses that carried messengers when the message was not urgent enough for a Herald. Common horses, but for the most part better by far than any that these hills had seen before.

But when they finally reached the outskirts of the encampment, it was something of an anticlimax, for it looked like nothing more than an ordinary army camp. They topped a hill, and saw the edge of the camp below them, across the slow river that split the valley in half, on the other side of a stone bridge. Sentries guarded the road there, the visible token of the ones Selenay could not see. Beyond the sentries, rows of pale canvas tents, rows of tents that were as even as furrows in the soil, that marched up the other slope and crowned the top of the hill, a strange and martial crop of spears and pikes planted in stands beside them. And yet, it was no larger an encampment than ones she had seen before, on the edge of the city.

She knew abstractly that it wasn’t possible to see all of it from any one point, not in these hills. She knew that in her mind, but the emotional impact of so great a force as they had gathered together should leave her breathless, or so she felt. So as the sentries barring the road demanded and received passwords, she felt oddly disappointed.