What they were doing here, however, buried in the dense forests of the Thousand Lakes, Valyn still couldn’t say. The two Annurian riders had been carrying a message for the kenarang all right, but the ’Kent-kissing thing proved to be written in some sort of cipher, a long string of meaningless letters and numbers that neither Valyn, Talal, or Laith had the faintest idea how to unravel. Both Annurians claimed ignorance of the contents, and Valyn believed them—there was little point in encoding a message if the meat of it could be extracted from the bearers at the point of a knife. All the messengers could give him was a destination, Aats-Kyl, a logging town at the southern tip of Scar Lake, and so Valyn and his diminished Wing rode southwest instead of south, following miserable tracks through dense northern forests of balsam and pine to Aats-Kyl. If il Tornja was planning an assault on the steppe, he’d certainly chosen an indirect route, but then, maybe that was the point.

“Looks like the entire Army of the North,” Talal observed.

Valyn nodded, running the long lens up and down the arrow-straight rows of tents. The Annurians had pitched their camp a little outside of the town proper, on a series of fields that might have been planted with squash or beans. Whatever the crop, it was destroyed now, the labor of an entire season ground back into the mud by the boots of the army.

He tried to estimate numbers, a task made easier by the fact that the Annurians always laid out camp in a neat grid, rank upon rank of taut white legionary tents divided into four quarters. At the center of each quarter stood a complex of larger pavilions: mess hall, blacksmith, quartermaster, and medical. A quick count of tents suggested twenty thousand men; more, if they were double-bunking to drop their carry weight on the march. It was a huge force, but Valyn couldn’t help but compare it to the nomadic encampment north of the White. Where the Urghul army had flowed from one hill to the next, their api and campfires sprawling over the steppe nearly as far as the eye could see, the Annurian force fit neatly into a single row of fields.

Valyn paused, squinted through the lens at the far side of the camp. He wasn’t high enough to get a good view, but it seemed that the soldiers there were armored differently from the rest. Occasionally, as the men worked in the setting sunlight, he caught a bright flash that looked more like bronze or gold than steel. It hardly made sense. The legions were too practical to spend money on ornamentation, but then, Valyn was quickly discovering that there was a lot he never learned on the Islands. The strange armor could have been one of a hundred things, and Valyn let it go, shifting his long lens to look over the town itself.