Jace
We left the horses and the men in a dry hollow a mile back and went forward on foot — me, Riley, Ben — moving through the scrub in the last hour before dawn when the light was grey and flat and good for seeing without being seen.
Ben moved quietly for a tall man. He picked his ground the way trained soldiers did, weight forward, no unnecessary noise. Riley was less disciplined but had good instincts and knew when to follow without being told. We had circled the whole hill before we came up over a rise and lay flat in the dry grass and watched the sun rise over Ashenveil.
I had built a mental picture of it from questions asked on the road and the picture had been accurate enough — pale stone cresting a hilltop, single road. What the stories hadn’t conveyed was the scale of it. The k
