Envy was an original sin.
Anvil Fortress stood amid the growing autumn chill, its gray-brown stone walls looking even colder and more forbidding beneath the leaden sky.
The once-spacious drill grounds and stretches of wasteland surrounding the fortress now presented a chaotic, lively scene utterly at odds with a military stronghold.
Countless weary feet had trampled the yellowed grass into mud. On hastily cleared ground, clusters of simple but orderly tents had sprouted like mushrooms after rain.
The air carried a mingling of woodsmoke, rising steam, bitter medicinal herbs, and the indescribable, complicated odor peculiar to thousands of people gathered together. The late-autumn wind swept up fallen leaves and dust, bringing waves of cold, yet a faint warmth stirred through the camp-the warmth of having survived disaster.
This was the breathing space granted, on the orders of Bagnia's Prince, to two thousand Minisian refugees who had struggled free of Raitelia's iron hooves. Their numbers were still rising.
Minisian refugees from across the Tavitsky Plain continued streaming toward Tavitsky. After the Extreme Warriors gave them a simple meal and a bath, escorts brought them back to Anvil Fortress, where Chris arranged their accommodations.
At the edge of the vast shadow cast by the fortress's high walls, Priest Oliver surveyed the noisy camp below with sharp, cold, vulture-like eyes buried deep in their sockets.
His pale priestly robe, embroidered with golden ears of wheat to symbolize Demeter, the Goddess of Agriculture, stirred gently in the bleak autumn wind. It brought not the slightest warmth to his gaunt, rigid face.
As a military chaplain, what burned in Oliver's heart was not compassion for life, but an almost obsessive zeal for purity of faith and a hatred of heathens that ran bone-deep.
Chris had requested military chaplains from both the Earth Mother Goddess Church