Two hundred miles from the capital, the countryside changed.
The agricultural belt gave way to the settled heartland, the terrain of towns and estates and the accumulated infrastructure of a kingdom that had not seen hostile forces within two hundred miles of its capital in living memory. The roads were better maintained. The bridges were stone rather than wood. The towns were larger, their walls thicker, their garrisons more permanent.
The towns' populations watched the column pass with the specific expression of civilians who were seeing something that their experience had told them was impossible: an orcish army, in formation, moving through the heartland of the Threian kingdom under its own banner, not raiding, not burning, not pillaging, but marching with the organized discipline of an army that had a destination and was proceeding toward it.
