He had seen an opportunity in the chaos here, had only waited for spring and safer weather. The long war was not over. It had begun before any of them had been born. It would outlast them all, Robbin de Vaux thought bitterly.

—

There is general agreement that King Hardan V of Angland, young, bold, fearing no danger—with a rabid beast’s thirst for blood (at least as reported by chroniclers in Ferrieres)—left his shores with a quickly assembled fleet in the spring. Quietly, in order to gain the element of surprise when he invaded yet again, aiming this time to reach Orane itself and a final conquest, capturing the mad king and his divided court, in a war that had gone on so long no one remembered peace.

He thought he had planned well.

He had in fact done so. And yet, the wheel of fortune rules us. Chance, happenstance. None of us are gods, even if some of the emperors of the Ancients claimed to be.

Hardan’s soothsayers and astrologers, his chiromancers, his land and sea commanders…not one of them anticipated or foretold the storm that overtook his fleet, though everyone knew spring storms did come, with shocking speed at times, in the channel between the two countries.

That channel, wild, turbulent, dangerous, had long protected Angland from the continent. That spring it did the opposite: famously, infamously, irrefutably.

The story that spread and became legend was that a young woman, a girl, really, from the village of Broché had made her way to the coast with a number of followers and had knelt in a sanctuary there, or by the sea under the sky, and invoked Jad’s mercy on Ferrieres—before anyone even knew there was an invading fleet on the waves.

And the storm came that very evening, out of a suddenly black sky!

She had been saying, this Jeanette, that she heard voices sent by holy Jad. Voices that instructed her to do all that she did, that guided her to the seashore, and afterwards.

Later, of course, it would be alleged by her enemies that what she had heard were demons of darkness from beneath the world, not voices from the god. That she was a heretic, an accursed witch.

The stories told—and heard—are shaped by what we need to, or want to, believe.

But some things are nonetheless agreed upon. There may be worlds where a wild storm did not come boiling up out of the west in the channel, where there were only blue skies and fair winds, where an invading fleet landed on the coast without incident and proceeded inland.

It was not so in this world, under Jad.

King Hardan survived to stumble wearily ashore. Only about half his fleet did so with him, it was determined in the wan morning light. The other half (perhaps a little more) were smashed in their ships and drowned. Famously, infamously?

Who was telling the tale?