He had come without an army, which was somehow more alarming than if he'd brought one.
Zereth's report, delivered in the hour before Karnathes crossed into the domain proper, had been thin on comfort. The Unbound, they called him in the old chronicles Zereth had dug up from wherever he kept such things—not for any territory he'd bound to himself, but for the opposite: no border anyone had ever mapped had held against him for longer than he wanted it to. Three other Kings, over the centuries, had tried to fortify against him outright. Two of those Kings no longer existed in any form that answered to a name. The third had simply agreed to whatever Karnathes wanted before the siege ever properly started, and had apparently found that arrangement survivable enough to still be sitting on his own throne a hundred years later.
