Greywater's walls were three centuries old, and they showed it in the way that maintained old things showed their age, not in decay but in the particular solidity of stone that had been repaired many times and knew what it was supposed to be.
The fortifications had been built in the period when the eastern provinces faced a threat from a direction that no longer existed, constructed by engineers whose names were lost to time but whose understanding of defensive geometry was evident in the overlapping fields of fire that the tower placements created, in the way the wall's course followed the natural contours of the ground to eliminate the dead angles that attackers exploited, in the thickness of the gatehouse construction that suggested the engineers had understood that gates were always where the enemy would focus and had built accordingly.
