Adare hesitated. It was a question, really, of who she could trust more. Or who she trusted least. Ameredad had nearly killed her, but of the two, il Tornja was by far the more dangerous. Which meant staying with il Tornja.

“All right,” she said finally, “I’ll stay with the legions.”

He nodded, then waved over a messenger.

“Inform the commander of the Sons of Flame that the Emperor has decided to march with the Army of the North.”

The man repeated the words back, saluted, then jogged east across the drying lake bed toward the assembled ranks of Intarra’s faithful. Adare wondered how Lehav would take the news, then decided it didn’t matter.

For a while they stood side by side in silence, an emperor who was not truly an emperor and a general who was far more than a general, watching the cold breeze ruffle the surface of the lake, shattering and shifting the reflected light of the stars.

“What happens if we don’t get there in time?” she asked.

Il Tornja shrugged. “Andt-Kyl is a choke point across the Black,” he replied. “It’s the one place we know the Urghul have to go. If they get past it . . . we could be hunting them all over the north, chasing them down while they burn towns and murder Annurians from Breata to Katal.”

“But the swamps,” Adare said. “The lakes. If we can’t move through this mess, how can they?”

“Oh, the terrain will slow them down for a while. It might take weeks for the army to break out of the Thousand Lakes, but they can split into dozens of bands, work their way through the wetlands at whatever pace they want. Once they break out onto solid, open ground, it’s over. They have a mounted army. We don’t.”

“Well then,” Adare said grimly, “we’d better get there in time.”

And so, as the sun rose through the trees and the cool wind gusted south across the lake, Adare marched north, Ran il Tornja at her side, Fulton stalking a pace back, the long ranks of the Army of the North strung out along the narrow strip of dry lake bed between the trees and the lapping water.

That water seemed to go on forever, stretching north to where it hazed with the horizon. Seventy didn’t look like much on the maps. Adare had covered ten times that distance since fleeing the Dawn Palace. Not, however, at the pace of the army quickstep, not hammering six or seven miles before the sun was even up. Her legs trembled, the arches of her feet ached, her shoulders had wound into a knot so tight it hurt to turn her head, and all she could see to the north was the endless line of dark firs marching away into the distance.