The Lord of Ashes

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Chapter 5

AI GENERATED

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Wounded and alone among the roots of the city he came to burn, a rider holds his dying drake's head above the rising tide, and the way out opens in the night.

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An elven warden is ordered to welcome strangers onto her ballista terrace on the one night it matters, and then has to choose which drake to kill.

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A young king who was raised to keep the accounts climbs the grain sacks himself, and finds the count is wrong.

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A young rider breaks his order to pull a stranger's boy from the sea, and then asks the clans to let him go back and answer for it.

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The fog comes down on the strait an hour after dark, and the Dalvo convoy is a night from home. Aruno, helmsman of the Brindle Goat, has a pocket full of paper chits where his silver should be and a speech for the tally-house he has carried home and back four times. This time, he tells himself, he will give it. He cheats the yard boy Cimu at dice to pass the watch, and gives him the coppers back.

Then the stars start coming up out of the dark beyond the harbor lights, and they are not stars. Out of the fog come narrow boats, fire arrows in the rigging, augers in the hulls, and a woman in a blue-grey sash calling orders in the elves' tongue. Within sight of the Strand's lamps, the Goat goes down.

In the black water there is one spar that will float a body. It will not float two.