The provincial capital of Irenmere was different from anything else in the campaign, and the difference was not military.
The walls, such as they were, had been designed more for civic ceremony than defensive function, a statement of the city's importance rather than a calculation of its security requirements. Two centuries of unbroken peace within the provincial interior had convinced the administrators who commissioned improvements to Irenmere's fortifications that substantial military walls were an admission of vulnerability, an acknowledgment that the settled heartland was not as secure as the administrative structure built upon it assumed.
The result was a circuit of stone that was impressive in its breadth and its architectural detailing and that a competent military engineer could assess in one look as insufficient to resist a force the size of the one now encamped two miles from its southern gate.
