Allissa
They convened the war council before midday because I would not wait, and I walked into it knowing the room wanted blood and had already chosen whose.
The chamber held every banner of the alliance and every ruler still under our roof, arrayed down the long table in the order the steward’s seating charts had agonized over for a celebration. Now the same chairs held a tribunal. I had not slept, and it showed; grief sat on me like a second skin and I had stopped trying to hide it. I had fed Mira at first light with my hands shaking and my body going through the oldest motions it knew while my mind ran north along an empty sky, and then I had put on the queen the way other women put on armor, because my daughter needed the queen functional and the mother had already spent the night o
