She remembered the day she’d seen him off on that final mission like it was yesterday. It had seemed no different from the other partings. She was older, perhaps, than she had been before, but still a child. She had been first in her class, and the elder Rigellus had told his daughter of the pride he felt in her achievements as they had walked the grounds of the family estate. Neither had known that would be the last time they would speak…and Katrine held that memory close to her, feeling gratitude that her parting from her father had been a good one.

It had been a bleak day when she’d gotten the news that he’d been killed, the heavy clouds and fog rolling in off the sea echoing her mood. The pain, the urge to cry…and then the discipline, the Alliance’s hard teachings slamming into place. To cry would be to dishonor her father. There was no place for tears, and certainly not for a warrior who had died heroically, bringing victory to his people.

She looked out over the same rocky ridges she knew from childhood, the wall of stone that rose above the crashing waves. Litora Montis had been in the Rigellus family since the founding of the Alliance, when her grandmother had taken it from the offworlders who had ruled over it before the Rising. Kat had heard the story told many times, at her grandmother’s knee when she was younger, before the old woman died, and later from her father, and even the senior retainers on the estate. It was treasured family lore, the type of tale that most Patrician families had in one version or another.

The elder Katrine Rigellus, Kat’s namesake, had been, by all accounts, an extraordinarily beautiful woman when she was young…and that beauty had brought unwanted attention on occupied Palatia. Kat suspected the old woman had never been entirely truthful about the abuse she had suffered, but she’d lived to take her vengeance, leading the other enslaved Palatians on the estate against their former masters, and by all accounts, letting not a single one escape. Kat suspected the outworlders’ deaths had not been pleasant, and save for those who fell in battle, not quick either.

Gran was born into slavery, and she lived to see her world freed, her family established among the leaders of a strong and growing Alliance. She was a strong woman, and the matriarch of the Regulli. She could have done far, far worse…