The horns weren't an attack. By the time I reached the eastern battlement with Zereth at my shoulder and Rena two steps behind, already reading the field the way she read everything, with her hand loose on a hilt rather than closed around it, I understood what we were looking at wasn't a final push at all.
It was a withdrawal.
Concordat's line, which had held the eastern approach in an unbroken wall of shields and pikes since the siege began, had come apart into something ragged and hurried — companies peeling back from the wall in staggered ranks, wounded slung between two men apiece, standards lowered rather than carried high the way an army carries them when it still believes the ground beneath its feet belongs to it. Fires still burned along the tree line where our last sortie had caught their supply carts. Nobody was putting them out.
"That's not a regroup," Zereth said, forearms braced on the stone, eyes narrowed against the smoke. "That's a rout with better manners."
