The commission's column had been on the border road since the previous night, and Iris ran at the head of it with the third holding's books roped between her shoulder blades.
Nobody behind her had eaten anything warm since the dark, and nobody said so out loud, because the young woman leading them hadn't slowed once and complaining took energy.
The commission's clerks made it worse by surviving. Three archivists swayed in the middle of the column with crate-files strapped where saddlebags should be, sleeping in shifts. One of them was drafting a second hazard-pay request in his head.
Ahead of them, out past the river flats, mysterious fires had been burning since midnight.
Iris had known that since dawn.
She had been moving at this pace ever since.
Stormlord rode the ranks up and down, and backs straightened wherever he passed. "Water at the next rise," he told the sergeants. "We stop for nothing else."
