To her marginal relief, there was no sign of the horsemen, no indication that they’d even come close. Just as reassuring, the Army of the North clearly hadn’t deployed to meet her own force, either.

A good ’Kent-kissing thing, she thought, given the size of the army.

The men were encamped, all of them, across several of the largest fields, tents and cook fires laid out in a grid so neat it might have been carved in the earth with a straightedge. Despite Adiv’s urgency back in Annur, despite the harried march north, despite the refugees on the road south, none of the soldiers in the camp looked to be in much of a hurry. No one seemed to be drilling or fortifying. Knots of men clustered outside their tents, some seated, some lying down, heads propped on their helmets. She could smell the smoke of the cook fires and burning grease hazing the air, as though the whole camp were set up for a festival rather than a war.

Anger and confusion rose inside her. She and Lehav had been flogging the Sons northward for days, Adiv’s account of a full-scale Urghul invasion ringing in their ears. Every night she’d prayed to Intarra to hold the horsemen back for one more day, just one more day. Meanwhile, il Tornja had his men lolling about in the sun.

She squinted, trying to make the camp out more clearly. Something wasn’t right. No one had attacked them. No one looked likely to attack them. Those facts alone should have calmed her nerves, but clearly there was more to the situation than she understood.

“What are they doing?” she asked, jaw tight.

“Looks like they’re resting,” Nira replied. “Maybe there isn’t such a hurry with this Long Fist, after all.”

As Adare watched, an Annurian rider emerged from the nearest gate of the town, and came cantering up the road. Fulton drew his sword well in advance of the man’s approach, then leveled it at him as he drew near. The messenger, a gaunt, balding soldier with peeling skin on his scalp, pulled up short at the sight of Fulton’s sword, took a deep breath, then turned to Adare and bowed low in his saddle, face pressed against the withers of his horse.