The barbarian withdrawal completed at the seventy-first hour.
The final column passed through the northern gate with Tharn at the rear, the youngest chieftain's position at the withdrawal's end the position that the chieftain's responsibility for the withdrawal's completion required. Tharn's crooked elbow caught the morning light as the chieftain paused at the gate's threshold and turned to look back at the capital that the highland clans had taken and held for eleven days and lost in a single night.
The looking was brief. The looking was the observing that a chieftain performed when the looking's purpose was the commitment of the view to the memory that the chieftain would carry back to the highlands and that the memory's content would inform the chieftain's future decisions regarding the lowlands and the forces that occupied them.
