“…But those three treacherous siblings, theft-bred,
Plotted long Perin’s heritage to steal
When Sveros, fearsome sire of all, was dead.
’Til then, they’d follow meekly at the heel
And by soft words and smiles their lies conceal
While Zmeos, their chief, banked his envious fires…”

A few courtiers shifted restlessly. Matt Tinwright, sliding back and forth between terror of death and the nearly equal terror of having his work ridiculed, could not help wondering if he had made the beginning of the poem too long. After all, every child raised in the Trigonate faith heard the tale of the three brothers and their infamous step-siblings at almost every religious festival. But Hendon Tolly wanted legitimacy, and so he had wanted as much in the poem as possible about the selfless purity of Madi Surazem and the perfidy of old Sveros, Lord of Twilight—the better to prop his own family’s claim to virtue, Tinwright supposed.

He did feel a little ashamed to be trumpeting the self-serving nonsense of such a serpent as Hendon Tolly, but he consoled himself with the thought that no one in Southmarch would ever actually believe such things: Olin Eddon had been one of the best-loved kings in memory, a bold warrior in his youth, fair and wise in his age. He was no Sveros.

Also, Tinwright was a poet, and he told himself that poets could not fight the powers of the world, at least not with anything but words—and even with words, they had to be careful. We worshipers of the Harmonies are easy to kill, he thought. The hoi polloi might weep after we are gone, when they realize what they’ve lost, but that does us no good if we’re already dead.

In any case, only Hendon Tolly appeared to be following the words with anything more than perfunctory interest. Now that his brother Caradon was no longer surveying the crowd, and had turned to stare disinterestedly at the banquet hall hangings, the rest of the courtiers were free to watch the duke and whisper behind their hands. Almost all of them had been out in the cold wind that morning when Caradon Tolly and his entourage had disembarked from their ship and paraded into Southmarch at the head of four pentecounts of fully armed men wearing the Tolly’s boar and spears on their shields. Something in the soldiers’ grim faces had made it clear to even the most heedless castle-folk that the Tollys were not just making a show, but making a claim.

As Tinwright declaimed the verses in which the Trigon brothers finally defeated their ferocious father, Caradon continued to tap his fingers absently and stare at nothing, but his brother Hendon leaned forward, eyes unnaturally bright and a smile playing across his lips. By contrast, Elan M’Cory seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into herself, so that even though Tinwright could see her eyes, they seemed as cold and lifeless as one of the eerie pictures in the portrait hall, the dead nobility that watched upstart poets with disapproving gazes. Matt Tinwright’s longing and dread were too great to look at her for more than a moment.