The anger came up the galleries like a wave. Quinlan's laughter rolled out over it, loud and genuinely delighted, and broke it apart.
"Let the greedy ones rest now. Every one of them is dead, and every coin they hoarded is going back into the mountain they starved."
Then he let the grin fade, and the hall quieted with it.
"We have long work ahead of us, and tomorrow we begin. But tonight..." His voice reached the deepest gallery without rising at all. "...tonight, we honor our dead, and we celebrate our living."
Torvek heard it from the wall, and his split knuckles closed hard against the flagstones.
Our dead. Some of tonight's dead had fallen to the Villain's own saber, guardsmen who had held their posts to the last order. Their killer had just claimed all of them, rebel and loyalist alike, as his own loss.
Their new sovereign would cut down anyone who stood against him, then mourn the fallen as his own people in the same night, and he saw no contradiction in any of it.
