The Southmark smelled like old war.
Not current war — the Ashwall was quiet, the trenches maintained, the garrisons rotated on schedule. But old war had a particular scent: iron rust, turned earth, the chemical residue of blessings that had been deployed in combat and whose divine energy had seeped into the soil and stayed. The Southmark's earth remembered combat the way the Ruined Shrine's altar remembered the first prayer — stubbornly, permanently, in a language that the nose understood before the mind caught up.
Ryn was back at the border. Not the Ashwall observation post he'd visited weeks ago — farther west, where the border province's military zone gave way to its civilian settlements. The Southmark was the kingdom's most paradoxical province: simultaneously the most heavily fortified and the most commercially active. The Wall faced south. The trade routes ran south. The threat and the opportunity came from the same direction.
