The Meren valley opened before them on the third morning, the eastern hills releasing the column into a landscape that was wider and more thoroughly worked than anything the Horde had moved through since the approach to Irenmere.
The river ran through the center of its valley with the unhurried certainty of a waterway that had been shaping this terrain for centuries, its banks lined with willows and river alders whose roots had grown into the bank structure and made the edges of the water more permanent than the soil alone would have kept them.
On both sides, the farmland spread in the ordered pattern of fields worked by people who had invested in the long-term relationship between human effort and specific ground, their boundary hedgerows and stone walls the physical record of the generations who had defined and defended these parcels.
