The true citizens of Alin were mostly farmers and herdsmen. Now, however, a great number of its population were now itinerant, being made up of soldiers and other travellers. Even to the locals, perhaps because they were so few compared to the many that had taken over, Alin had become a traveller's town, a place to pick up supplies and hear traveller's tales in the local inns.

Baldric's army had preceeded that led by Gart the dwarf and Damond of Brand by several hours, and his forces passed through Alin without stopping. When Gart and Damond finally arrived leading their own force across the bridge and came to the city centre, they stopped and were met there by Brogan and Dorain who had arrived only a matter of hours earlier. Gart and Damond dismounted, dismissed their men, and were led by Brogan and Dorain to one of the few stone buildings of Alin. This, the house of Wilkin, was also the largest, a turreted affair with black slate roofs and mullioned windows. The estate was surrounded by a high wall of close-fitting, mortared stone, and was hemmed in by dark, forbidding-looking, winter-denuded elms, whose fallen yellow leaves lay in heaps upon the ground, covering over shrubs, and piled up against the wall here and there by the soughing northern wind. In places where the ground was untouched by the sun there




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