King Aldric III rode through the capital's eastern gate on the third day of the fourteen-day period.
The king's return from the field produced the specific response that a monarch's return from a lost campaign produced in a capital whose population had been watching the war's progress through the dispatches that the council's public notices disseminated: relief that the king was alive, anxiety about the war's continuation, and the particular silence that civilians produced when the monarch who had ridden out at the head of thirty thousand soldiers rode back with the armor dents and the facial lines that losing battles against an enemy with superior weapons had carved into the features that the coins bore.
