An unnamed mountain pass in a spur of the Mountains of the Moon.
By the time Yohn Royce led his battered troops through the pass, noon had already come and gone.
Fewer than a thousand men remained behind him: several hundred infantry, more than two hundred archers, and a scattering of routed soldiers.
Of the eight thousand who had set out, these were all that remained.
He did not turn to look at their faces.
He did not dare.
Beyond the pass, the terrain suddenly opened up.
Here, the spurs of the Mountains of the Moon spread into rolling hills. Hills large and small stretched on and on, crisscrossed by ravines that divided the entire region into countless battlefields of varying sizes.
Battle lines stood on every hill and at every ravine mouth. Spears rose like forests, banners crowded together, and rank upon rank stretched from the foothills halfway up the slopes, farther than the eye could see.
Bronze Yohn reined in his horse and silently studied the sight before him.
He saw the banners of the Vale: the falcon and crescent moon, crows on white, the burning tower, the broken wheel... Almost every house of any renown in the Vale of Arryn was gathered here.
He saw the formations of the Westerlands. Unlike the Vale nobles with their distinct house banners, they had all assembled beneath the Lannisters' Roaring Lion Banner, their ranks impeccably ordered.
He also saw the troops from the North: the Karstarks' sunburst, Flint's stone hand, Dustin's crossed battle axes-those northerners had been stationed on the high ground at the rear.
Scorpions had been mounted on every hill.
The enormous crossbows were secured to wooden frames, their iron bolts gleaming coldly in the sunlight as they pointed toward the sky. Each bolt was as thick as