The Mistmarsh delegation arrived at Ashenveil's eastern gate on a rainy morning in Year 263, twelve years after the war that had made them vassals.
There were eleven of them. Eight Frogmen soldiers in formation — well-equipped, well-disciplined, their green-grey armor the same standard cut as Gorvahn's army had always worn, adapted only in the detail of the sigil on the shoulder: the Mire Lord's emblem flanked, now, by the Iron Sovereign's forge mark. A Human diplomat. A Frogman scribe. And, walking at the center of the formation with the specific deliberate unhurriedness of a creature that had spent four hundred years learning how to enter rooms without appearing to have rushed:
Gorvahn himself.
