Both POVs
Bramwell
We stayed in Verath for two more days.
Aldric's daughter, Cara, was reunited with her father in Tola's upper room in a scene that I did not watch because it was private in a way that made my presence an intrusion. I stayed downstairs and reviewed maps and thought about what it meant to have power over people's children.
I thought about Mira. About the night she'd been taken from Lenora's arms. About how that act had been so unremarkable to the soldiers who did it — just another piece of an operation, a containment measure, a problem being solved.
The dehumanization of cruelty was always in the procedural language. Containment. Resolution. Processing. The words that made terrible things sound like paperwork.
Lenora found me at the map table.
"Cara is settled," she
