The council in the capital received the latest dispatches from the northeastern front on the morning of the seventh day of the Snowe dominion's siege.
The dispatches were not encouraging. The king's army, reduced to eighteen thousand effective soldiers, had fought two additional engagements since Vinefield Ridge. The first, at the town of Gorham's Bridge, had cost fourteen hundred dead and nine percent of the remaining thundermaker ammunition. The second, at the Ashfield crossroads, had cost eleven hundred dead and seven percent more. The king's thundermaker ammunition was now at thirty percent of the original stockpile. His boomstick ammunition at forty-two percent. The barbarian advance had not been stopped.
The council read the dispatches in the chamber where the memory of the Horde's chanting still lingered, the specific vibration that stone walls absorbed and held in the way that stone held everything, permanently and without comment.
