Aldrath's column reached the king's position at Brennan's Ford on the fifth day of the forced march, and the king's army did not look like an army.
It looked like the thing that armies became when the things armies fought with were gone and the thing replacing them was whatever the soldiers could hold in their hands. Sixteen thousand soldiers, their thundermaker batteries empty and positioned behind the camp like gravestones, their boomstick ammunition at twenty-six percent and rationed to ten charges per man, their battlemages exhausted from three weeks of casting spells that the barbarian shamans redirected into the Threian positions.
