The change in Minisia's patrols was unmistakable, so obvious that even Olaf, hiding deep in another dense grove, could clearly sense something was wrong.
Previously, the hoofbeats outside the woods had been as regular as a pendulum. At fixed intervals, they swept across the open ground beyond the trees, approaching and then receding, as though silently declaring that White Rock City's defensive perimeter was impregnable.
Now, however, that suffocating rhythm had been disrupted, and badly.
Lying behind a bush, Olaf peered out while his rough fingers absently mangled a damp fallen leaf... a little habit of his whenever he was thinking.
Time seemed to crawl. When had he last heard hoofbeats?
Olaf counted back in his head. The interval had been long enough for a squirrel to stroll from the roots of a tree to its crown, then stroll back down again.
The patrols were passing far less frequently. It was no illusion, nor a figment of his overwrought imagination.
He could even imagine those Minisian riders gathering somewhere else, dozing in some warm guardhouse, or perhaps... something major had happened inside the city, drawing away the forces that should have been stationed here?
The dense canopy blocked most of the starlight, leaving the woods pitch-black.
It prevented Olaf from seeing exactly what was happening on White Rock City's distant walls, but he could "feel" it.
It was the instinctive sensitivity to a battlefield's atmosphere that came with being a seasoned veteran.
That invisible, taut string in the air seemed to have slackened a little. The moving points of torchlight carried by the night patrols on the walls also seemed fewer and slower, especially around the southwestern corner near the wooded hills, where he had been concentrating his attention.
An internal rebellion?
A change of commanders?
*Or had some greater