With a gesture she knew to be smooth, she proffered two sealed letters. The contents would repeat her message and confirm her identity, provided that the council didn’t think she’d murdered the real Branwyn Alanive on the road and taken her place.
The footman, resplendent in a purple coat with gold braid, took the letters from her and transported them the entire twenty feet to the platform where Heliodar’s rulers sat. Branwyn waited.
She felt overdressed in her wool gown and bronze torc, and not in terms of finery. Most of Heliodar’s council wore gemmed circlets, rings on many fingers, and an assortment of silk and velvet that would have made tailors and courtiers in Criwath weep with envy. They wore the silk thin, though, and the velvet slashed open. Rognozi’s violet and silver brocade was long-sleeved and his only ornament was the circlet, but age and frailty likely played a part there. Branwyn didn’t know what lay behind the long, plain black sleeves and high collar of the oily man, but even his clothing was far thinner than she would’ve expected in the Hunter’s Month, midway through autumn.
She should have expected it, though. Heliodar, out of all the human kingdoms, still had the magical strength for fireless heat, as well as for the pure white globes of light that illuminated the council’s private audience chamber. Those who had power generally weren’t shy about showing it off.
Rognozi opened the letters with a silver knife and a shaking hand. He read slowly while Branwyn waited, ignoring the way sweat was making her back itch.
“Likely their war,” the fox-faced woman whispered to the mustached man, confident that her words wouldn’t carry.
Normally, she would have been right, but Branwyn had gotten her minor blessing from Tinival, god of justice and truth, when she’d been reforged as a Sentinel. The whisper and what came after reached her ears clearly, as on an unfelt wind.
Their war. She stifled her response.
“Good to have real word instead of rumors,” the lord with the mustache muttered in response.
“Official word, at any rate,” said the woman.
The ostentatiously plain one was eyeing Branwyn as though she were a dog that might bite—or had just not been house-trained. The one in spectacles was blinking, frowning either in nervousness or perplexity. The youngest was simply watching, his pale, narrow face alert. He wore a bronze circlet on his shoulder-length dark hair, unlike Rognozi’s gold or the others’ silver: Branwyn wasn’t sure what that meant.
Criwath and the Order had been able to tell her very little. Heliodar, being the least affected by the winters that ravaged the world, needed few Sentinels, and those who went there didn’t have much to do with the nobility. The High Council and King Olwin carried on sparse correspondence, as became countries that were neither allies nor enemies, and what few traders went between the two didn’t often meet with the city’s rulers either.
Finally, Rognozi folded both letters and handed them back to the footmen, who put them on a small table to the side of the dais. “I’m convinced of your identity, Madam Alanive,” he said, which should have made Branwyn wince, had she been a more honest person, “and the message you bear is dire. Say it now, please, so that we can all hear at once.”
The moment was upon her.
“Thank you, my lord,” she said, and drew a deep breath. “I come to beg the aid of Heliodar, in an hour when Criwath’s need might become that of the world.”
“The war?” It was the youngest lord, who leaned forward in his chair as he spoke. “The Skinless Ones?”
That sounded like another name for the twistedmen, the ordinary—if one could call them that—forces arrayed against humanity. Certainly it described them well enough.
“Just so, my lord, and worse. Thyran the Traitor, Thyran Bloody-Handed, has returned.” Before any of the seven could reply, before the startled gasps from around the court could turn into murmurs of speculation and disbelief, Branwyn continued. “I saw him myself, in the siege of Oakford, and I’ll swear as much before any knight of Tinival. The man who broke the world walks it again.”
* * *
She was the most interesting thing to happen all day—all bloody year, if Zelen was being honest.
The pageantry of council sessions always appealed to him: the rolling words of the ceremony, the smell of incense, and the rich colors of tapestries and stained glass and clothing. He came away feeling as though good had been done, and despite his tenuous position, he’d helped accomplish it often enough that he didn’t entirely dread the meetings or reporting on them to his father. The family very rarely issued instructions to him, and mostly it didn’t offend Zelen to carry them out when they did. Some meetings were actually exciting.
Until Madam Alanive’s entrance, this had not been one of them. The year was winding down, and the business at hand involved reports of winter supplies—necessary but dull—preparations for the Festival of Irinyev—much as they’d been every year—and toad-like Marton rambling about the Problem of Vice in Our Fair City for the fifty-third time.
Then, this woman. New. Terrifying in the news she’d brought: Thyran, servant of Gizath the Traitor God, had almost conquered the world a hundred-odd years back. He had started years of storms, blizzards that had damaged even Heliodar badly and had reduced the more northern landlocked kingdoms to famine and cannibalism. He, his storms, or his armies had also unleashed a fascinating assortment of monsters on the world. Just before the storms had reached their peak, he’d vanished. “Died,” all of Zelen’s tutors had said, but they’d never mentioned how. When Zelen had gotten old enough to read for himself, he’d discovered that nobody knew.
If he was back, with an army… Zelen saw the blood drain from his fellow councillors’ faces and felt it leave his own. Nearsighted Starovna raised their joined hands above their
