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"My lord Hanrahan," Isabell said calmly as she seized control of the conversation, ignoring the laughter around her to direct a sharp, hardened gaze at the portly baron.

"Do you know what the greatest difference between wars fought in the old countries and wars fought against the demons is? " she asked calmly.

"Men can be reasoned with and forced to surrender," the portly baron said instantly, waving a hand as if he could shoo away her question like a distracting fly.

Clearly the woman intended to claim some sort of knowledge about wars that were irrelevant to the struggle against powerful demons and he had no intention of allowing her to build momentum around that notion.

"When men squabble, all you have to do is scare your opponents into surrender and victory is yours. Men will back down if you press them hard. They’ll yield territory, hand over treasures, even surrender their daughters to secure a peace instead of fighting an expensive war that ravages their domain for little gain.

Demons though," he said, waggling a thick, sausage-like finger at her as though he were explaining things to a small child. "Demons fight to the death."

"Humans will fight to the death whenever they believe in their lord and their cause," Isabell corrected.

"Though perhaps my lord baron has never encountered men who would show their lord the kind of fanatical loyalty that would send them charging toward the pikes and spears of their enemy," she said, casting a disdainful look over her shoulder at the collection of sycophants who seemed to have come to this banquet for no other reason than to prop up and praise their pathetic excuse for a liege lord.

"No, my lord," Isabell continued. "What I was referring to is the holy edict that prevents the Church from taking sides in a conflict between lords and kingdoms of the old world. Unless some lord or king has transgressed against the Church greatly enough to be declared a heritic and an enemy of the Church, wars in the old countries never benefit from the overwhelming power or the healing grace of the Church’s miracle workers. "

"It sounds like those wars must be very.

.. tame," Baron Hanrahan said dismissively as he tried to imagine what it would be like to fight an enemy who couldn’t wield flesh rending sorcery or to charge that enemy without Inquisitors in their ranks, calling down holy fire to pin down the enemy while the knights charged.

When he stripped away the greatest dangers on the battlefields of the frontier, the wars he imagined taking place felt.

.. tame. "Perhaps in the old countries, wars are more like tournaments, fought for sport. Especially if they’ve allowed your poet husband to bring his wife along to spectate. "

"Who said I was spectating?" Isabell said as she swirled wine in her goblet and leaned back in her chair.

"Here, if you want to destroy a demon fortress, tear down its walls and trample its people, you turn to the Church and they pray to the Holy Lord of Light to smite your enemies for you.

There, they turn to engineers to crush their enemies. "

"You’re saying that you can take the place of an Inquisitor?

" Sir Rian asked incredulously from his position near the end of the table. He’d fought side by side with Inquisitor Diarmuid in Lord Owain’s battle against the flat tailed demon’s village and he’d seen first hand the might of the Inquisition.

By the time they reached the village, even though the devious demons had left barricades and traps in their wake when they fled, nothing could resist the might of the Church’s Holy Flame. In the end, nothing had been left of the village but a smoldering ruin.

"I’m saying that against a town like this one," Isabell said, draining her goblet in a single swallow and gesturing for a servant to refill it. "I would only need twenty men and five days to reduce it to a pile of smoldering rubble."

"Preposterous!" Baron Hanrahan roared. "The walls of this town have stood for close to one hundred years! No demon assault has ever breached them, and no demon has ever managed to scale them. You’re telling me that you and twenty men could do what an entire demon horde failed to do in my grandfather’s era? "

Spittle flew from the furious baron’s lips as he spoke, and his face had taken on a reddish hue of rage.

He’d agreed to provoke the overly proud merchants so that Lord Owain could draw them into a position from which they’d be forced to accept a chance to ’prove’ their capabilities, but he’d never imagined that these money grubbing guild masters would be so shameless as to claim to be more powerful than the demons his family had guarded against for generations!

Now, all thoughts of Lord Owain’s careful instructions fled from his mind as he slammed a fleshy palm on the table while berating the woman who seemed to think of herself as the chosen one of the Holy Lord of Light, or at least the most powerful woman in the history of the Kingdom of Gaal!

"This isn’t Blackwell County," Barnon Hanrahan snarled.

"Out here, a person has to be responsible for their words. Idle boasting costs lives," he said, gesturing at the people sitting at the lower tables. "I wouldn’t trust a braggart to protect my people, much less bestow them with the honorable title of ’knight.’"

"Speaking nonsense like this," he said, turning to face Owain.

"My Lord, please take this as a protest from your loyal vassal. This woman is unworthy of the title she’s attempting to buy, and this man with her is likely unworthy as well.

Please reconsider before they usher in a tragedy that will claim the lives of many innocent people and soldiers. "

"Why don’t you let Master Isabell speak?" Tiernan said, glowering at the blustering baron. "Can it be that my lord is afraid to hear what she has to say?"

"I want to hear," Owain said, leaning forward and gesturing for Baron Hanrahan to hold his tongue.

"Master Isabell, you speak of destroying a town like this as though it’s a common thing in the old countries, but I find that hard to believe.

Please help fill the gaps in my knowledge," he said with a charming, well-practiced smile.

"How would you destroy the Town of Hanrahan?" Owain asked pointedly. "And can you tell us of a time when you’ve done such a thing?"

"I already told you that this town should be torn down and rebuilt to remove the thatched roofs," Isabell began.

"It should be done for the good of the people living here, to keep the damp out, and to prevent sicknesses that come from rot that sets in when the thatch isn’t maintained.

Lothian March is so rainy, foggy, and damp that I doubt their roofs ever dry properly except during the summer. "

"But to a person like me, all those piles of thatch with buildings clustered so haphazardly together and streets that meander every which way," she said, shaking her head as she recalled the way the city had been laid out. "I wouldn’t even need to breach your walls to burn the town to the ground. In fact, those walls that you’re so proud of would become my best tool to see to it that you and all of your brave soldiers die the worst deaths imaginable. "

All around her, the Great Hall had gone completely silent. Forks and knives stilled in people’s hands as everyone stared at the steel-haired woman sitting opposite Baron Hanrahan with a sense of growing dread.

"The Town of Hanrahan isn’t that different from Umwelt City in the Emerald Kingdom," she began. As she spoke, her gray eyes grew distant, and her gaze drifted away from the people sitting around the table as she thought back to a different time and what felt like a life that barely belonged to her. She’d been a different person then, one who had been willing to do whatever it took to end the civil war that gripped the kingdom where she’d met the man who stole her heart. ..

"You have to understand," she explained as her mind became lost in her memories. "Civil wars are terrible things that turn father against son, husband against wife, and in the Emerald Kingdom, it turned the young king against his uncle..."