No one spoke. The wind simply blew, as if to drown their thoughts away, and carry them off with it. The stormy wind that roared that day was as cruel as the winds of fate. It tossed the long hair of Penelope with a relentlessness, and it forced Vale to hang onto to her golden braid, for fear of having it continually bash into the side of her head.
"Well, we're fucked aren't we?" Vagrin said eventually. He was the first to speak, but it was a statement that exemplified how they were all feeling better than everyone else. "If the King is involved, then it isn't a question of how many men they've got anymore – it's how many men they don't got."
It was clumsily put, and ordinarily, it would have been grounds enough for Northy or Silverfish to make fun of him, but it was still true enough. The King had access to many more troops than the Earls. He could bring as many thousands of men as he wished to, and there was naught that the Sea Serpents could do about it.
