I have spent most of my life counting things other men don't bother to count — wagon axles, grain sacks, the exact number of paces between a well and a picket line — and it was that habit, not the incense or the seven banners snapping over the command tents, that told me what we had built at the Greyfen Line was larger than anything the Concordat had fielded in living memory.
Forty-one thousand men. Nine hundred war-clerics. Sixty-three siege engines blessed twice over, once by their own kingdom's rite and once more by the joint council, because no one wanted to be the commander whose catapult failed for want of a second prayer. Seven kingdoms' worth of boots pressed into the same mud, and somehow, against every argument I would have made a year ago, they had stopped stepping on each other's supply lines long enough to march as one body.
