The two days passed the way all waiting passes before violence — slowly at first, and then all at once.
Aragon spent most of it on the ridge.
He didn't sleep much. He didn't pretend to. He sat at the highest point of the crest, where the rock curved up into a natural parapet, and he watched the enclave through the pre-dawn dark and the white heat of the days and the long purple cooling of the evenings, and he learned it the way you learn something you intend to break — by understanding exactly where it holds together.
The Northern enclave had not always been called that. It had been built three generations back as a military outpost — the northernmost fortified position of the southern kingdoms before the wilderness took over, a hard square castle of black desert stone squatting on a rise of ground that gave it sightlines in every direction for six miles.
