The council table in the central keep was covered with topographical charts, military manifests. The captured parchment treaty bearing the wax seals of Lord Silas Crane and Chieftain Ymir-Krag.
Judge Malric Ostrander sat near the cast-iron stove, his silver hair catching the amber light of the oil lamps as Sister Teresa handed him a steaming clay pot bowl of hot mutton broth and crusty rye bread.
The judge ate with starving haste, his hands still trembling slightly from his breakneck flight from the royal siege camp.
Beside the stove, Ostrander’s twenty sworn void-court guards stood in their polished steel cuirasses and black tabards, their hands resting upon the handles of their longswords, watching Giles Croft with guarded, respectful eyes.
“I rode three horses into the ground to reach your lines before Crane’s vanguard could encircle the turnpike,” Ostrander said. He set down his wooden spoon.
“When I challenged him in his silk pavilion, he didn’t even deny the pact. He laughed at me.”
Ostrander took a slow sip of hot tea, his eyes dark with the memory.
“Crane was sitting in a carved armchair of gold-trimmed cherrywood,” Ostrander recounted, his voice tight.
