The herald arrived at Millbridge on the morning that Westyn was expected and the herald was not Westyn.
The rider came under a flag that was not the diplomatic standard but the kingdom's military courier pennant, the narrow red streamer that indicated the message was from the council's war office rather than the foreign affairs bureau. The rider was young, professionally composed, and carried a sealed case that he presented to the Verakh escort at the valley's northern approach with the formal stiffness of a man performing a duty whose content he had not been told but whose weight he could feel in the way the case had been handed to him.
Sakh'arran received the case at the market hall's entrance and broke the seal and read the document inside with the focused silence of the campaign's analytical officer encountering information that the analysis had identified as possible but had not placed at the top of the probability distribution.
