The staging area was a cleared field half a mile outside Liedenstorm's western gate, and at dawn it was cold enough that the breath of two hundred candidates hung in the air above the assembled crowd like something half-solid.
They had marched out in the dark, in groups, by garrison — a long procession through the city's pre-dawn streets while the city itself was still mostly asleep, the only sounds the tramp of boots on cobblestone and the distant bells of the morning watch. Nero had walked between Arthur and Jacob, none of them talking, the cloth-wrapped shape of Gungnir under his arm and his rations in the pack on his back, and the city had closed behind them through the western gate and then there had been the road and then the field.
