Most of them consisted of endless reports from officers and artisans of what they had been doing to get ready for the battle. Ted wondered fleetingly why they always spoke of a battle rather than of a war. Then, with a jolt like coming to the end of a flight of stairs one step sooner than you expect, he remembered the Border Magic. It became clear to Ted that what Randolph called the mundane army had been mustering for weeks. Probably the old King had ordered that; he had believed that something was happening down on the southern border. The sorcerers, on the other hand, were in a state of vast disarray. Some of them had been quietly persuaded by Fence or Randolph to prepare as they would for a battle with monsters, and the division this had created between those who agreed with Fence and those who did not had cut right down to the apprentices and made a tangle of political and personal grudges and alliances such as Ted had never imagined in his wariest moments. And even the mundane army was not entirely ready for this battle: the great strength of the old King’s army had been the cavalry, and horses, said Fence, were afraid of all sorcerous creatures.
