Even that flicker would have been enough to damn them had her aunt Saramin been present. Her mother’s elder sister had never reconciled a fate that had seen her born to a gender treasured even as it was disdained for weakness. She took every opportunity to repay indignity with wrath. By contrast Aella – Melanna’s younger aunt – revelled in the exertion of wiles and basked in the heady, secret power born of rank and allure. Melanna had learned from both.

Or so she told herself. Facing down Drakos Crovan was one thing. Confronting her own people was another matter.

“Perhaps you’d escort me to my father?”

“Should I not send for the lunassera?”

Saramin would have glowered. Melanna smiled. “Am I not safe in your company?”

Brannor’s fingers gripped the hilt of his belted sword. “My life before yours, savim.”

“Then we need not stir the sisterhood from meditation.”

How old was Brannor? Forty winters? Fifty? A long life, filled with the screams of the dying, and the flutter of the Raven’s wings. And yet the thought of being alone with her unsettled him.

Melanna breathed a silent prayer to Ashana. Her authority was slender enough. Each challenge – each denial – was a setback. But like steel, authority had to be tempered to reveal its true strength. If she hid from challenge, then the life she longed for was as good as lost.

Ashana heard her prayer. Discomfort won out over disobedience.

“As you wish, savim.”

Melanna offered a smile just the right side of respectful, as Aella would have done. “You honour me, havildar. Lead on.”

For most folk, the journey to the prince’s tent would have taken an age. However, Melanna had the twin warrants of her face and the flat of Brannor’s sword to clear a path.

Outriders cantered past, sallying forth to forage in the rich valleys below. Clansmen laboured to erect tents and stow possessions. And all around, the prayers and the brawls and the rich, close-harmony work songs. A hive of anarchy and raucous sound, all bent to a single overarching order.

Melanna knew every song, but they seemed incomplete without women’s voices in counterpoint. Back home, the lighter, sharper notes would have struck glorious contrast. But women were permitted more freedom back in the towns. There, noble daughters claimed vocation as merchants, advisors, priests and artists. And those of common birth joined menfolk in manual labour. A woman could carry any burden, so long as it was not a sword, and few travelled with the army.

A little beyond the vast, black consecrated folds of the tent that served as the army’s temple they finally reached the palatial, fur-lined tents of his Exalted Highness, Champion of the Golden Court and Heir to the Imperial Throne, Kai Saran.