Talwyn had climbed for two days to reach the table above the clouds, and every step of the way she’d rehearsed exactly how she would announce herself. None of her rehearsals accounted for there being six of them, from six lands she’d only heard of in her grandfather’s war stories, all turning to look at the ragged girl who’d just interrupted a council that hadn’t met in a generation.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said the one in the horned helm, not unkindly. “This table only calls its own.”
“Then it called wrong,” Talwyn said, “because it called me, three nights running, in a dream I didn’t ask for. There’s a fire moving through the Ashgate pass. It isn’t natural, and it isn’t stopping.”
Silence settled over the cloud-table like snow. The samurai in dark lacquered armor exchanged a glance with the woman in leopard-skin at his side — a look Talwyn couldn’t read, old and weighted with something between them.
“The Ashgate fires,” the green-robed elder said quietly, “haven’t burned since the last time this table was full.”
“Then it’s full again,” Talwyn said, surprising herself with the steadiness of it. “You didn’t call me because I’m important. You called me because someone had to climb up here and say it out loud.”
The Roman set down his cup. One by one, the others did the same, and Talwyn understood — with the particular clarity that comes right before your life changes — that she had just become the seventh chair at a table that hadn’t needed one in a very long time.