Stories from the realm

Three centuries of silence end on the morning the western tax road falls, and a court built to intimidate discovers it is surrounded.

A contract is refused in a gilded room and a second one is agreed, and a kingdom that has not yet heard of either is already being sold.

The most powerful man in Ashkar loves his daughter without limit, and builds her, one reasonable precaution at a time, the cage she will spend the rest of her life trying to leave.

The palace was built to watch what comes in, and almost nothing about it faces the other way, so the Supreme Ruler's daughter walks out through the ash carts and finds a room where nobody has ever heard her name.

The maps of western Ashkar simply end in green, so a man with a brass ruler draws a line through the painted forest, and the realm discovers that the land already knew where it began.

Twenty-eight million crowns die with a single decree, and the men who cannot buy the decision back spend years discovering that a ruler who will not be bribed is also a ruler who will not be quietly killed.