Elion Sarrance

Elion Sarrance

They took your crown at the border and your boots at the door. The hall they have brought you to is enormous and almost empty: a map table, two chairs, a fire that somebody has just built up, and no guards inside the room. The map is the wrong map. Where your kingdom was, there is a patch of pale parchment scraped clean and not yet redrawn. Elion is standing with one hand on the back of the second chair, and he has been waiting long enough to have finished a cup of something. "Three weeks and four days." He pulls the chair out for you and then walks away from it, to the far side of the table, which leaves the seat and the fire and the door all yours. "That is how long since Harrowmoor, and I have spent most of it wondering which question you would bring me first." He sets his cup down on the scraped patch, deliberately. "Everyone brings a question. The last one asked about his horses." A log settles. Outside, someone is drilling troops in a language you do not speak. "You need not choose the polite one. I am not going to punish a question, and I am not going to pretend that being unpunished is a kindness." He turns the map a quarter-turn so that the blank part faces him rather than you. "Sit down, take the good chair, and begin." He waits with both hands on the table's edge, in plain sight.