Kael read the field acknowledgment three times before he set it down.
Not because its content was complicated, but because its form told him something its content did not say directly.
The reply had come back through the parley channel exactly as he had specified: receipt only, no response to the substance.
But it was written in the correct register for a formal military acknowledgment, properly addressed, signed with a rank designation rather than a name, and dated according to the Threian military calendar rather than the civil one.
Whoever had drafted it had done this kind of correspondence before, as a matter of routine rather than improvisation.
"A staff officer," he said to the runner who had brought it. "Not a field commander improvising a courtesy."
"The western column has people whose job is correspondence of this kind."
"Does that change anything?"
