The strangled screams of everyone I’d left behind echoed through the passes, reverberating through my skull. But with the jagged peaks of the Peshkalor Mountains shading my back, I might as well have been a hundred miles away. Our homeland, pillaged and burning and crawling with invaders, lay less than a mile north of here. Not because of the fact that a city like this, gray and humble though it looked from here, no longer existed in Seravesh. Tears prickled my eyes and I blinked them away, telling myself it was the bite of the winter wind making them water. His silence was like a great intake of breath. “What do you see?” I murmured, my voice too low for the soldiers behind us to hear. General Arkady edged his horse closer to mine, and an expression I couldn’t quite name creased the maplike wrinkles of his face. The legion at my back could take it in an afternoon, but I hadn’t come to start a war. The smallest holding in the Free State of Idun, it had only a few hundred inhabitants crowded about a crumbling seaside castle. From my hilltop perch, the walled city of Eshkaroth wasn’t much to look at. I pulled the cloak closer about my shoulders, ignoring the bead of sweat dripping down my spine.
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