Chương 74: CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR: THE RETURN

They came back through the Ironfen in the afternoon, moving faster than they had come — not urgency, but the specific ease of a force that has completed its mission and is no longer in contested space. The terrain felt different on the return, or perhaps Marcus was reading it differently: the specific wrongness that had characterized the deep Ironfen was absent, or reduced, or he was simply no longer attuned to it in the same way.

The three wounded were managed through the march — the soldier with the broken arm immobilized and transported on a makeshift stretcher that Hollis's field protocol specified. The two others were walking with support. None of them were in immediate danger.

Corvan led them south, back through the transitional zone, back through the territory that was still the Ironfen's edge and then the march's boundary and then the known country of the northern district with its farms and its fields and the north road leading to Greyhold. They reached the road in the late afternoon.

Marcus felt the exhaustion arrive when they reached the road — not during the operation, when the sustained focus had held it at bay, but when the focus was no longer required and the body's honest accounting of what the day had cost came due. His feet were telling him things about the hours of walking in the Ironfen. His shoulders were telling him about carrying the pack and the weapons. His eyes were telling him they had been doing detailed observation work in changing light conditions since before dawn.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. He ignored all of it until Greyhold was visible. The town appeared on the southern horizon in the early evening light, the walls catching the last of the sun from the west, the smoke from the kitchen fires beginning to rise in the cooling air.

It was, Marcus thought, the most reliably affecting sight he had encountered in four years — not beautiful in any dramatic sense, not impressive by the standards of the places he had seen in his previous life. Just: Greyhold. Real and present and the thing he had been building toward and the thing he had been building. The garrison at the gate had been briefed to expect them.

The watch change was happening as they arrived, and the outgoing watch held their position when they saw the column on the north road, which was not protocol but was human — nobody leaves when the force comes home. Hollis called the column to a halt at the gate and did the accounting — his standard post-operation process, the check that confirmed everyone who had left was among those returning. Fifty-seven soldiers plus Marcus plus Corvan. The three wounded. Fifty-seven, all present.

"Open the gate," Marcus said to the watch commander. The gate opened.