Thessaly had a file.
Not a physical file — she had long since committed everything in it to memory — but she spoke about Drevus with the specificity of someone reading from a document they know by heart. She had been building the dossier for nine years, piece by careful piece, through the network of old Lunara loyalists and quiet watchers and people who had loved the Queen and had not stopped loving her cause simply because it became inconvenient.
"Drevus is seventy-three years old," Thessaly said. "He has been on the Eastern Wolf Council for thirty-one years, head of it for fifteen. He is—" She paused. "He is not stupid. I want to be clear about that, because there is a tendency to dismiss enemies as less intelligent than ourselves and it is a dangerous tendency. He is intelligent, meth
