Although his legs ached and his head swam with the terrors of the day, Tol soon found himself falling asleep. As Luin sank below the hills, he dozed, head bumping Egrin’s back in time with the horse’s plodding gait.

Next Tol knew, they were cantering down a dusty lane, far from any place he’d been before. Tall cedar trees lined both sides of a road worn deep into the sandy soil. The company rode two abreast. Dawn had broken, and the new day washed the countryside in golden light. Tol marveled at that. Never in his life had he slept past sunrise.

He and Egrin were at the tail of the column. Lord Odovar was leading it. Riding next to the warden was Manzo. Although he was younger than Egrin-his face unlined-Manzo’s brown beard was prematurely streaked with gray. His wide-set brown eyes scanned the area alertly.

The group clattered up the lane to the crest of a slight hill. The marshal held up a hand to halt his men.

On both sides of the road, beyond the ornamental cedars, lay tilled fields of a size Tol had never imagined. Plowed land stretched to the horizon, north and south. The enormous tracts dwarfed the little garden patches Tol’s father had carved out of the wilderness. A bullock could toil all day in one of these fields, Tol thought, and never make a turn, just cut an endless furrow all the way to the where the sky and land met.

In between the plowed tracts were plots of fallow pasture, fenced with split rails and rubble stone. Strangely, no one was working the vast fields, and no herds grazed the pastures.

Lord Odovar signaled Egrin. The warden of Juramona brought his horse alongside the marshal’s.

“Half a league from home, and it looks like the wastes of Thorin,” said Odovar. “The Pakins doubled back on us, didn’t they?”