Snowe's scouts found the Horde at six hundred paces.
The alarm spread through the Threian formations with the disciplined speed that professional soldiers produced when their training prepared them for exactly this kind of reversal, the command chain responding to the impossible information with the controlled urgency of officers who had been in difficult situations before and had survived them through refusal to panic.
The orcish army was behind them. Not in front of them, not on their flank, behind them, six hundred paces away and advancing in formation through the predawn farmland with the focused, ground-eating pace of an army that had been marching for hours and had arrived exactly where it needed to be.
The formations wheeled. Not perfectly, not with the parade-ground precision that undisturbed drills produced, because nothing about this situation was undisturbed.
