‘What do you think, Vedren?’ Tarfel pressed close to Chel, his gaze darting between the reaver guards who flanked them. The nearer one was a tall woman, beast-shouldered, with thick braids of jet-coloured hair bound beneath a helmet fashioned from an ox skull. Her furs were clean, thick, embroidered beneath. Chel caught the crystal blue of her cold eyes as she swept them over the group, and he flinched back.

‘I have great faith in your diplomatic capabilities, Tarf,’ he replied in a near-whisper.

‘What do you reckon they’re jacking on about?’ Lemon said, one arm leaning on Foss, who looked peeved. ‘Hardly strikes as a tearful reunion, eh?’

The attention of the group shifted very perceptibly toward Kosh, who was hunched at their centre, arms wrapped around her alchemical sack. ‘Ugh,’ she said, ‘must I do everything for you? How is it I am surrounded by such incapable infants?’

‘Strikes me you’re the smallest, crunchiest person in this hall, Nort,’ Rennic growled, ‘and we infants are the only thing keeping you alive.’

She scoffed. ‘Who was it who engineered our escape on the lake, who produced—’

‘Hush,’ Loveless said, ‘they’re finishing.’

Brecki was dismissed, sloping off toward the hall’s far doors without a backward look. The woman at the dais looked over to the group, smiled, and beckoned. Something about the smile’s brilliance made Chel nervous.

***

The woman with the blue stone maintained her smile until they were all standing before the dais. Up close, there was more than a hint of a sneer about it. ‘Welcome,’ she said in their own language, ‘I should perhaps introduce myself. Or reintroduce myself, as appropriate.’ Her accent was obvious but controlled, her speech fluent, colloquial.

‘What do you mean, reintroduce?’ Rennic had shouldered his way to the front, trying to reassert a measure of dominance. Normally one of the biggest humans in any gathering, he seemed unnerved by so many large, brawny figures around them. ‘Not sure any of us has ever travelled down to this beautiful part of the world before.’

She smile-sneered again, but it was without contempt, which Chel took as a good sign. ‘You have not, but I have been north in the past, no doubt much to your surprise.’ She leaned back, resting one hand on a chair that sat on the dais, small and relatively simple, before and to one side of the throne. Another matching chair sat on the throne’s far side, and Chel wondered at their significance. ‘I spent some time, a few years ago, studying at the Academy in Denirnas, among other things. I once met a young man, the little brother of two of my classmates, who had travelled there to visit with a great retinue.’

Her smile widened as her eyes sought Tarfel among them. ‘That is you, isn’t it, Prince Tarfel? You’re taller now, I’ll say that for you.’