Chapter 3: The Coalition Accord at Vethmark

The harbor city of Vethmark smelled of brine and rendered tar and, underneath both, the particular sweetness of sawdust from the shipwrights' quarter where three new vessels were still being fitted for the sea-nation admirals who had arrived two days ahead of schedule and immediately begun arguing with the harbormasters about mooring rights. Wren could smell all of it from the window of the building they were using as a staging office—a converted counting house four streets back from the great square, its former ledgers stacked in the corner to make room for her maps. She had been awake since before the harbor bells.

The city had been building toward this day for three weeks, in the way that cities build toward things they understand as historical: quietly, then all at once, then with a kind of performative normalcy that fooled no one. Banners had appeared on the harbor-front buildings—coalition colors, the interlocking symbols of the seven kingdoms and the forest-clans' green-and-copper blazon and the sea-nations' white field with its navigational star—and the market square vendors had raised their prices by fifteen percent in anticipation of the delegations' purchasing power, and children had been pulled from their usual haunts and scrubbed into presentability by parents who wanted them to be able to say, when they were old, that they had been there.

Wren rolled the supply-route map she had been working on since dawn and reached for the window latch. Below, the first of the forest-clan delegations was moving through the narrow street, the chieftains' standard-bearers in front and the chieftains themselves behind—older men and women mostly, leather-faced and unhurried, with the particular bearing of people who had spent years making decisions that mattered to the people who would eat or starve by them. She noted their pace. She noted the spacing between them and the sea-nation party moving parallel through the adjacent street, visible through the gap between buildings. She noted, with the automatic precision she brought to all spatial arrangements, that the two groups would reach the square's eastern entrance at almost exactly the same moment and that someone would have to yield right-of-way.