Ysra counted the Lessaran line from the top of the watch-tower in the first grey light, the way she counted everything she could not yet touch, from the highest point she could reach and then down, row by row, until the figure stopped moving.
It did not stop for some time. It was too large to stop quickly. The Crown had brought six hundred foot down the Lessary Road and left them on the causeway above Lantern Ford in companies of fifty, twelve companies in a double line, with the carts drawn up behind them into a park of wheels and tarpaulin. She counted the companies by their banners, which were small and grey and bore no device except a black bar at the foot. She counted the carts by their axles, which she could see as dark stripes against the frost. She counted the cookfires, which were lit in a row along the marsh-edge like a string of beads somebody had dropped and then not bothered to pick up.
Then she counted the latrines.
There were fourteen. They had been dug in the frost during the night, in a straight trench behind the carts, with a board across each one and a canvas screen on poles. Ysra looked at the trench for a while, and then wrote the figure down, because it was the most honest thing she had seen in the Crown’s camp all winter. An army that had dug its latrines so carefully was an army that…
