The plan that emerged over the following two weeks bore little resemblance to anything Elira might have imagined when she first arrived at Veskara, believing herself entirely alone with nothing but careful patience to sustain her.
She would travel to the capital, but not as the sealed, exiled princess the invitation had summoned, arriving quietly under crown escort to be exposed and destroyed according to someone else's careful design. She would arrive instead on her own terms, accompanied by evidence considerably more substantial than Halvard's grain contracts alone, and by allies whose loyalty the conspiracy's architects had never accounted for when they'd first exiled her to a forgotten border province, believing distance alone sufficient to neutralize whatever threat she represented.
