The council meeting was almost over when Priam fell.
Lysander was standing near the window, watching the winter light move across the stone floor. The morning had been grey and cold, the kind of morning that seeped into the bones and stayed there. Doros was reading the supply figures—the grain reserves, the salted fish, the sealed jars of olive oil that would keep the city fed if the worst came. The councillors were nodding in their seats, their faces carefully neutral. It was an ordinary morning. The kind that had happened a hundred times before.
Then the king tried to stand, and his legs went out from under him.
