Act V, Chapter 24: The Slaughterhouse of Intentions — What Vengeance Actually Costs

The doors came off their hinges.

Not opened — taken from the world entire, the iron-banded oak that had stood two centuries of ceremonial passage exploding inward in a cascade of splinters and dust and the sudden overwhelming noise of men, of boots on stone, of a dozen voices giving orders in the flat practical register of soldiers who have already killed this morning and expect to kill again before the hour is done. The pressure Aldric had been hearing through the walls for the past five minutes resolved itself into its source: Rowan Voss, elder son of Edran, King of the Ash Marches as he had declared himself, standing in the ruin of the throne room's entrance with a sword already drawn and blood already on it that was not, from the color and the quantity, entirely other people's.

He was taller than Aldric remembered. This was not possible — three months was not enough time for a man grown to grow further — and yet the brother who entered the throne room was somehow more than the brother who had argued with him in this same castle four months ago and called his patience cowardice. The winter campaign had stripped something from him, some courtly softness that Rowan had always worn with the faint embarrassment of a man who knew it did not suit him, and what remained was leaner and older and altogether more dangerous, and behind him came twelve soldiers in the Voss grey and ash-blue, and behind them the sounds of larger conflict that had not yet resolved itself in the outer corridors.