The southern principals arrived on a Thursday with snow.
Not a heavy fall — the particular light, persistent kind that settles on everything without drama and transforms the landscape incrementally, so that by the time you notice it the world has already changed. The kind of snow that suited the occasion, I thought. Things shifting gradually. The new texture of something not yet fully arrived.
There were four of them.
Governor Aldous Maret — the primary southern governance authority for the eastern half of the southern territories, the decision-maker Crane had been representing. Compact, sixty, with the specific weathered quality of someone who has held significant authority long enough to have stopped performing it. He looked at Ironveil's gate with the assessing attention of a person
