The Verakh network's daily report from the Threian capital reached Yohan on a morning when the first significant snowfall had blanketed the city's streets overnight and the work crews were clearing the main thoroughfares with the organized efficiency that Droktagar had built into the maintenance schedule before his departure for the highlands.
The report was routine in its first three sections: market prices, troop movement observations at the northern frontier, the quarterly council session's attendance record. Sakh'arran read these and made his standard notations. He had been receiving the daily report for two years. The act of reading it had become as habitual as breathing, which meant he read it with exactly the right level of attention: enough to catch what was different, not so much that the attention wore out on what was the same.
The fourth section was different.
