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towering oak doors, the wood as old and
rotting as the keep itself, and knocked once.
“Enter.”
Yrene felt the tremor that went through
Chaol at the cold, sly voice.
The doors swung open to reveal a dark,
column-lined hall speared with shafts of
watery light.
The only greeting they would get, it
seemed, since the man seated at the head of
the long, wooden table, large enough to host
forty men, did not bother to rise.
Each of their steps echoed through the hall,
the roaring, mammoth hearth to their left
hardly taking the edge off the cold. A goblet
of what seemed to be wine and the remains of
the evening meal lay before the Lord of
Anielle on the table. No sign of his wife, or
other son.
But the face ... it was Chaol’s face, in a