Vesha had a new ledger. That was how I knew things had actually changed, before any envoy said a word to me directly—she'd retired the old one, the slim volume with the cracked spine that had tracked every skirmish and supply shortage since I first crawled out of a mass grave with a gauntlet fused to my arm, and replaced it with something twice as thick, bound in something that looked suspiciously like dragonhide and probably was.
"You could have kept using the old one," I said, watching her set it on the war table with the reverence most people reserved for holy objects.
"The old one was for a warlord clawing together a warband, my lord." She opened it to the first blank page, quill already inked. "This one is for a court. Different ledgers for different lies people tell about themselves. I prefer to keep the categories honest, even when the man they describe would rather not look at them too closely."
"That's not an answer."
