They smelled it before they saw it.
The wind shifted somewhere in the last mile and brought it with it — smoke and hot metal and the specific sharpness of coal burning at sustained high temperature, layered together into something that sat in the back of the throat and stayed there. Nathan noticed it through the carriage window first as a change in the air's character, the clean southern smell of trees and earth replaced gradually, then completely, by something industrial and relentless.
He looked up through the window toward the sky ahead.
Smoke. Not the thin wisps of ordinary cooking fires or the scattered columns of a town going about its business — thick, dark billowing columns rising from multiple points and spreading overhead into a permanent grey haze that sat above the treeline like a ceiling the territory had decided to install.
The servant girl noticed it too.
