Verissan woke to drums.
Tobian Marrow went to the eastern gate because the whole city went, and the one man who stayed in his room while two thousand soldiers marched out would be the one man worth remembering.
Alistair found a place against a cooper's wall where he could see the gate platform and most of the road below it.
He watched the way the people around him watched, with his mouth a little open, the way a Halversen scholar gawks at soldiers he has only read about.
They came out at dawn in column, and the column did not straggle.
There were no loose seams in it, none of the gaps that a green formation shows under a hard turn.
These men had drilled together for over a year, and a body could read the year in the way the ranks held their spacing through the hard turn, every soldier finding his interval without looking down for it.
Halcyra Vohn rode at the head of them.
