Cleora's handwriting filled the first, neat and unhurried despite the distance between them, each line carrying the quiet competence of a woman who had learned to run a barony the way a general runs a campaign — steadily, without panic, correcting course before anyone noticed there had been a course to correct. The harvest was strong. The eastern well had met resistance from a landowner too proud to yield easily, and she had yielded nothing in return until he did. A few of Rothgard's remaining loyalists had tried stirring unrest among the merchants and found the ground beneath them already gone. Small fires, put out before they became anything worth writing home about.
She missed him. She said it plainly, without decoration, the way she said most things that mattered.
Jolthar set the letter down and lifted the second.
