Colonel Gresham received the report on the evening of the fourth day.
He was in the command post at Valdenmarch, a stone-walled fortress that the Threian military had maintained as a frontier garrison for three generations and that Gresham had spent six months transforming from a neglected border outpost into the operational headquarters of the Frontier Force. Maps covered every wall. Dispatch riders came and went through the courtyard with the regularity of a pulse. The officers who served under him had learned that the Colonel's work hours were defined by the existence of work rather than the position of the sun, and that interrupting him with important information was never wrong regardless of the hour.
The dispatch rider who brought the southeastern observation report was a young cavalryman whose horse was lathered and whose face carried the particular expression of a man who had ridden hard because the content of his message demanded it.
