My first night as the Luna of Ashenveil, Kael showed me the kingdom by lamplight.
Not the great hall, where the people had bowed to me, and not the war room, where the maps were. He took me up onto the high walls, where the wind came cold off the northern mountains, and he showed me the sleeping kingdom below the lit windows, the smoke from the chimneys, the shapes of a people settling in for the night behind walls they trusted to hold.
"Forty of us left," he said, leaning on the stone beside me. "When the kingdom fell, we were twelve thousand. Now we are forty, and most of those are old, and I have spent five hundred years watching the number get smaller and being able to do nothing about it." He was quiet a moment. "And then you walked out of a forest, and for the first time in five ce
