The army filled the garrison ground from end to end and spilled beyond it. Entire companies had been forced into the surrounding yard because the field itself could not contain twenty-one hundred soldiers in proper ranks.
From the low stone step at the northern side, Beorn could make out the front three lines clearly. The rest became a mass of bodies and disciplined stillness behind them, and that stillness carried weight. Two thousand men who had just finished exhausting drills knew how to hold position after a command. They also knew when no further instruction had come.
The uncertainty spread across the ground almost as heavily as the silence itself.
Beorn kept the ledger tucked beneath his arm. He had no reason to open it, the names had already been called.
