Snowe convened his officers after the Lettra barony report reached him, and the meeting had a quality that his previous councils had not possessed.
It was not that the officers were less capable or less composed. The two weeks of campaign had produced in all of them the particular alertness of military professionals who understood that the enemy they were facing operated according to a logic whose applications they had consistently encountered after the fact rather than anticipated before it.
The Horde moved, the Threian force responded, and the response consistently addressed a situation that the Horde had already moved past. The pattern was a campaign's worth of evidence pointing toward a conclusion that everyone in the room had reached independently and that no one had stated explicitly until now.
