Drakk arrived at Yohan's northern gate on a morning when the forge district's smoke rose straight into a windless sky and the training grounds' cadence drills sounded like a heartbeat through the city's wall, and what struck him first was not the size of the wall, though the wall was larger than anything the highlands had built in his lifetime, and not the smell of the city, though the smell was the smell of a hundred thousand small fires and ten thousand cooking pots and the iron-and-oil smell of the forge district that undercut everything else the way iron undercut everything else it was mixed with.
What struck him was the sound of children.
