Act I, Chapter 3: Rowan Declares Himself King of the Ash Marches

The courier arrived at dawn, which was the wrong hour for bad news. Bad news ought to arrive at midnight, when the body had already abandoned its defenses and the mind was rotten with sleep — that was the civilized arrangement, one Aldric had observed the world consistently failing to honor. Dawn brought the lie of new beginnings. Dawn brought frost-burned men on exhausted horses with dispatches folded seven times and sealed with wax the color of old blood, and the court had to receive such things upright and dressed and wearing its face.

He heard the horse before he saw it. He was at his window — he had been at his window for some hours, the grey almost-light of his thinking having stretched itself, without his full consent, into the pale gold of an actual morning — when the sound of hooves on the courtyard's cobblestones reached him. A single horse. Hard-ridden: the cadence was wrong, ragged, an animal past its comfortable range and moving on obligation alone. He watched the rider dismount in the yard below without the natural fluid motion of someone who had not spent three days in a saddle. The man nearly went down when his boots found the stone. He caught himself on the horse's flank.

Aldric noted the device on the saddlecloth before the courier had straightened fully.