“The only spot, sir,” Bridger replied. He was handling the arrival of a Kettral Wing, the announcement of an Urghul army, the abrupt deaths of his mayor and constable, and his own elevation to the town’s leading position about as well as could be expected, but he kept glancing at Gwenna warily when he thought she wasn’t looking, and had settled almost immediately into referring to Gwenna and the others as “sir.” She had no idea what to make of that, but she figured they had more pressing business than sorting out the honorifics. “Half a mile north,” the young man was saying, “the Black bogs out. You could ride a thousand horses in there and not one of them would see the other side.”

“What about a hundred thousand horses?” she asked grimly.

He shook his head. “They can’t get across up there, not unless they go all the way into the mountains, and then it’s all black flies and balsams packed so close you can’t see through ’em. There’s a few log camps up there, but that’s it.”

“Log camps?”

Bridger nodded. “A couple score men and ten thousand logs stacked up on the bank. We’re late for the log drive this year. No bridges, though. No way across.”

“And south is the lake,” she said, looking out over the sheet of water to where it hazed into the sky at the horizon. “How long is it?”

“Not sure, exactly. Maybe fifty miles. Maybe more, with Aats-Kyl at the other end.”

“So that’s why the Urghul are coming here.”

The logger looked at her. “Are there really a hundred thousand of them, sir?”

“Probably more,” she spat, then immediately regretted it. For all that Bridger looked like some bruised-knuckled logger—all sun-browned skin and ropy arms, bushy beard, and leather on top of wool on top of more wool—he couldn’t have been much older than her. She tried to imagine how she would have responded if she’d never joined up with the Kettral, if she’d stayed home on her father’s farm and then one day, out of the blue, discovered that an invading army was a few days out, that she was the first and only line of defense. She was tempted to say something reassuring, but then, the assurance would probably just be a lie. “There’s plenty to kill us all a dozen times over, if we fuck up.”

His lips tightened, but he nodded. “Then we’d better not fuck up.”