“All right,” Jeril said, turning to Gwenna. “I need to send two men back each day, one at dawn, one at dusk, to bring a report to the kenarang. The rest of us are yours.”

Gwenna looked into the predawn mist and steam rising off the bogs and ponds, streams and lakes to the east. It threaded through the balsams and pines like smoke, draped thick over the lake, brightening slowly as the sun rose from a wooly gray, to white, to dull orange, as though the whole forest had caught fire. Each morning for three days, she’d climbed the beacon tower, in part to survey the town’s fortifications, in part to hunt for some sign of the Urghul, but mostly because it allowed her to be alone, to step outside of the throng of people for a few minutes, to leave behind the unending questions and requests, demands and complaints and pleas.

The whole thing was less of a shit-show than she’d expected, actually. The East Bridge had been hacked to kindling, save for the four final pilings thrust up from the channel like dead trees. Jeril and his scouts had been useful in overseeing the movement of all food and relevant supplies off East Island. Despite her hesitation, Annick had built up an impressive set of earthworks and barricades on the eastern shore of the island, and even now had half the village making arrows. Andt-Kyl’s two forges had been ringing day and night as the blacksmiths pounded every scrap of extra metal—pot iron and scrap steel, barn hinges and old nails—into arrowheads. Some people had griped about that. Annick sent them to Bridger, Bridger sent them to Gwenna, and Gwenna sent them back to their homes with a few choice words and orders to scare up more steel.

It was exhausting trying to think through every aspect of the defense, and infuriating arguing with the loggers over every little point, but the hardest part was the worry, a sick, corrosive acid in her gut, a never-silent humming in her brain that refused to let her sleep more than a few hours each night, that made it hard to keep down anything more than a biscuit and water. Truth be told, she’d been frightened for weeks, ever since quitting the Islands, but that was a different kind of fear, one for herself and her Wing. The trainers had prepared her for that—When you fight, went the motto, sometimes you die. There had been no motto, though, for people who didn’t expect to fight, for the loggers and farmers and fishermen who would end up on Urghul lances if Gwenna failed. The Eyrie had told her all about killing, but there hadn’t been much about keeping tiny little villages at the end of the empire alive.