“I’d have been about your sister’s age. Fresh from the Sartorov chap-terhouse. A squire eager for the front lines. One so very resentful of playing at honour guard for a privy councillor.”

“My mother?”

She nodded. “Used to walk around the city. Nobody of standing walks anywhere, but she did. And so did I.”

“She was the same here.”

“You shouldn’t force folk to look up to you,” Yanda quoted. “Only I was full of the arrogance of youth, and I wanted folk to look up to me. I’d earned it. I wanted folk to see me as something better than them. But I couldn’t. Not around your mother. Second day she was in Tressia, a hospital ship came in from Northwatch, thick with wounded. There weren’t enough orderlies to get them ashore to the sick-houses, so she rolled up her sleeves and pitched in. Dragged me along, too.”

“I had days like that.” Josiri wondered more than ever where the conversation was leading. “Chasing down lost livestock. Carting food up into the hills for old Ezrack when the snows came in.”

Yanda grunted. “Sounds right. I hated her. Thought she was mad. Then I saw her unpick a dockers’ dispute where Lady Isidor and Lord Akadra spent two months without any progress. Took her an afternoon.”

Josiri stifled a twitch at the mention of the hated name. “She’d a knack for that.”

“It was more than that. The guildsmen trusted her. They’d seen her suffering the press of crowds instead of parting them with a carriage. They’d heard about the hospital ship . . . and the rumours she’d stopped her arrogant honour guard handing out a beating to a pair of keelies.”

“You?”

Yanda shrugged. “It’s a lucky woman who’s proud of all her yesterdays. Tried picking my pocket, didn’t they? Point is, the guildsmen saw her more as one of their own than one of the Council. After she left, I swapped the Sartorov wolf for the hawk of the regular army.”

Josiri started in surprise. A commission in one of the Republic’s knightly chapters was not readily thrown aside. Whether you fought alongside your fellows or took up secondment to an officer’s command in the regular army, it promised status and advancement enough to satisfy the hungriest ambition. He’d dreamed of it himself, before the War of Secession changed everything. He still recalled the recruiting poster. The crude sketch of the ‘shadowthorn’ emperor with his roots burrowing across the border and deep into the Republic. The call to arms for all true sons and daughters.