The bridge to the palace mirrored the modernity of the much larger Donneamor at the city's entrance with girded and ribbed support given through counter levering trusses and squared up towers; otherwise, in surface decor it was a lovely archaic structure built in brickwork made to resemble cross-patched tresses.

Braziers flickered from the top of the bridge towers with the shadows of guards mingling on the crosswalk cast down on Leresai and Captain Bierdé as they rode their steeds beneath. She glanced up. Formidable men had been assigned the duty. Their eyes were not deterred from inspection by her own casual gaze.

As they crossed on to the palace grounds, she still remained unsettled by the brief respite of Captain Bierdé's halt before the bridge. What did she see in the far cast of his eyes? What did she hear in the hesitancy of his voice? She knew what she heard, regret.

It confirmed that his escort was no mere happenstance in this evening's intrigue. She had allowed sentiments grown over the course of the evening dictate her feelings for the man and cloud her judgment of the part in this matter he played. Here, beside a deft warrior of the highest caliber, one of whom could possibly best her, she had let her guard down.

Still, what was his purpose? Bierdé possessed no sympathy for the D'jestre who were at the heart of the troubles in the palace.

He wasn't merely here to lead her away from the crowded view of the city dwellers to dispense with her on the more isolated palace grounds. The warehouse district he avoided for the more circuitous route he insisted upon provided a more flexible course of opportunity to be rid of her without spilling blood on House Lyoneid soil.

Most curious, instead of preventing her intrusion, he assisted her entrance. These contradictions between Captain Bierde's actions in his official role resolved into clarity. He was at her side this evening to appraise her.

Leresai could feel his eyes on her. She remanded the scrutiny of his gaze with a question.

"Do you plan to return to the goddom, Captain?"

She glanced his way when silence stretched long. In Bierdé's eyes, now focused steadforth ahead, she could see the smoldering smoke and whipping flames curl. Even without evoking the silver, with her mere intuition, she knew dead certain Bierdé burnt all correspondence betweenst the two Mer'Kendretta ever wrote.

"No. A good stretch of time passed before I recognized this place, but this is home."

His focus broken, Bierdé turned towards her with a wide smile. The anger she had seen in his eyes merely a moment before, he now kept under the control of a shrewd, willful mind. Still, Bierdé did give her a glimpse of his thoughts as he continued to speak.

"With all the troubles in the rest of the Imperium and elsewhere in the world -," his eyes returned to the severely manicured terrain ahead of them, and with a grimace displayed along his jowl so pressed as to appear buttressed by his neck, Bierdé continued, "this, I no longer have any doubt is the best place for me to be as a man of the Midvries. It is the best position of authority I could request in countering the troubles that find their way here."

She nodded, satisfied with the outcome of this line of inquiry. It was time to play up the charm of T'nonnon'B. With a barely audible gasp, she gazed up at the palace.

Her brow arched with an expressive elven pitch. Her smile, for emphasis, Leresai made lackadaisical before drawing her upper lip taut then flared into her left nostril for an accentuated sneering effect.

"I see you have never laid eyes upon a more grandeur palace, have you,"

Bierde' responded dryly. "Sunwelder's abode being merely a carved mountain of semimat granite and precious stones, how could it possibly compare favorably with the ethereal and unworldly beauty of House Lyoneid?"

She smirked ever-so-slightly, "this… is a capable structure. Your Lord's palace serves its function well enough I'm sure." Leresai answered, her tone dripping in the casual condescension renown of the elven people.

Rising in the near distance before them, felsite columns interced between slates of sandstone. This formed the imposing outer walls for the diamond shaped four storied towers capped with needle point spires that grace each double cardinal wing of the two-storied palace proper and served to support the central dome cast over the atrium with jutting granite slabs in diagonal incline towards the asymmetrical front atrium. Smaller domes rose on the adjoining halls connecting the doubled wings.

The edifice of House Lyoneid in its entirety rose from behind the garden but it did not overshadow the riders as the grounds were well lit so even in the early evening it's subtle contours were still well displayed.

The pathway from the southernmost bridge led to the west wing. A black iron gate cut off access to a twin wing to its immediate north.

Leresai surveyed the yard. Above the palace grounds, further west, she could make out a colonnade from the Lyoneid family mausoleum on a hill above the garden. The garden itself comprised most of the accessible grounds.

Beyond the hill, sloping to the South were dense forest and marshlands leading to the old castle ruin. Leresai recalled her encounter with Renua Lyoneid seven years previously and wondered if Barathiel Solugarr still evoked the wizard.

She had grown curious after the death of Brietess over the means the advocate obtained the wizard's companionship. Every manner of supernatural contact that she was aware would be prohibitively expensive or worse, costly beyond mere material wealth.

She finally figured out the means. It was the ghastly liquor she discovered while rummaging through the locked chest in his closet. She had since that day made query and uncovered disturbing intelligence concerning the Deadsift. It disturbed her to know kind and gentle Barathiel was involved in its distribution.

It wasn't possible to ask Barathiel now about his involvement. Once the best of friends, Leresai could only regard their falling out with remorse. Barathiel stared so very sternly into her eyes the last time they met.

All we ask of you is to return the body of my sister.

"It would be easier to rip the beating heart from my chest and hand it to you now." She answered.

Tears flowed so readily in his presence.

Bierdé pointed her attention back towards the palace with the wave of his hand. He was in his element and seemingly at ease.

"I've circled these grounds for many years now. Still the lines of the palace elude me as they smooth to a round and then when I turn my steed by even the breadth of a hoof my lady is all jagged angles and blocks of impossible stonework that do not confit to any sensible eye."

"How can you navigate this in its entirety," she inquired. "It is sectioned off quite severely, Captain?"

His shoulders shrugged with a jerk when he nodded as if his body was reluctant to follow along with what he was about to say.

"The path is altered for me as I traverse the grounds. In the watchtowers on the riverbanks and in the stone buildings just on the other side of the garden are gear-men and just under those braziers are spotters wearing field glasses to guide them."

What was his motivation in telling her this? Was he giving her a hint on egress?

"The palace is secure to quite a lengthy degree," she remarked.

"It's necessary given the military arm of the Midvries and the administrative are kept under separate powers and have been since the palace was first built nearly ninety years ago.

"We have to be prepared for the ambitions of generals who may get notions on limiting oversight of their fiefdoms if unrest were to occur.

"Not to alarm you, White Hawk, for our relations with the martial corps is amiable and healthy at present but if the troubles of the D'jestre cities were to come here I would expect that to change."

Leresai smiled and nodded along but could not help but think of the junta coups that displaced royal families and their loyalist in the Ninci provinces stricken by the Gloom past fifty years ago. It was tactful of him given the Imperium sided with the coup leaders and not the royal houses.

It served notice to the royal houses of all the administrative provinces their rule was only tolerated to the extent their leadership was effective.

Bierdé continued, "if any general wished to challenge House Lyoneid, he would have his nose cut off. There is a concentration of force at the bridge gates and internal city garrisons that would halt the march of a well-equipped legion on its own.

"In the northwest, where the blue fir forests sit on hills above marshland glades, rangers with wolfhound packs sweep through constantly. On the southern end, where the river spreads into the tributaries she runs shallow through shoals of thick shrub bearing skerries.

"You have to transverse through both to get to an old fort ruin where House Lyoneid's original homestead stood."

"Is that the wizard's college," she asked.

"That is correct, White Hawk, the brother of the duke at the time was a practitioner of the Art who instead of allowing the castle to become fallow grounds turned it into a wizard's college. So, you have heard the tale of Renua Lyoneid and the wyvern in the Elven Goddom of Voïlétél even?"

"Certainly," Leresai answered with a quick nod of confirmation. "There is even a Suüd sex romp based upon the event."

"No," Bierdé's breath drew out the syllable long as he chuckled and he shook his head.

"It took some liberties with the truth as the sex of the wyvern was changed for the sake of the narrative."

"There is nothing sexual in the story of Renua and the wyvern. If anything it is a story perfect for illustrated children's books to highlight man's hubris." Bierdé cleared his throat before continuing, "the wyvern lives there still.

'If an intruder were to evade naval schooners that keep the coast line relatively free of pirate coves and smuggler dens, he would still have to contend with a flying leopard thrice the speed of a natural-born one. A beast possessing a barbed and poisonous tail, a spit of acid that can melt your leathers and hides, and skin nearly impenetrable to the edges of ordinary blades."

"Have you seen this wyvern, Captain?"

"Oh, indeed," he confirmed.

"What did you do?"

"I watched it dance in silhouette in fore to the Moon. I remained still as stationary until it grew bored with dance and it flew away."

"You once fought frost giants, did you not feel…," with her chin arisen aslant, "compelled to the challenge, sir?"

Bierdé feigned a wounded heart and clasped his chest, smacking the chain chinks of his wrist holds against his breastplate. "You chide an old soldier roughly, White Hawk.

"But, no. The wyvern for all its monstrosity serves his purpose well. It is one I have no desire to disturb."

Their destination came into view. Steps led to a terrace entrance where two guards stood with flaucherd-glaives set rigid in their arms.

Before the riders a path meandered through a garden that now transformed from well shorn bushes in the whipping shadows of long limbed dogwoods made to rise in attenuated cascades on the edge of the yard embellished in the dictate of long-established Midvries fashion that, as they rode further down the path, changed into a scaped terrain with an assembly of many colored pebbles arranged in orient symmetry under low lying bowed trees with limbs pruned into severely drooping archways along the concourse.

An aesthetic that originated from Eastern civilization made extinct long before Izdun's grazeland armies swept the western nations millennia ago.

Leresai gathered from the clean spread of smooth pebbles not broken down by rake into jagged gravel the practice was brought to the palace only recently.

She glanced at Bierdé. His free hand tossed the brown mane of his steed. One he must have ridden for years for the beast's stride not be perturbed by its master's moods.

He was once more gauging Leresai's reaction to an aesthetic that would have been blasphemous to have appeared on the palace grounds of the Imperium even in recent decades.

Bierdé caught her glimpse and grinned, tilting his own gaze to the statue of a luxuriously adorned mountain goat for Leresai to assess with her own wit and good sense.

Coifed, its hair braided with ornamentation; it was a beast being primed for venerated sacrifice in an age-old motif common to D'jestre gardens.

Whatever Bierdé expected of her, Leresai chose to make light of it.

"I don't mean to intrude in the matters of men," She began, "but when I enter the palace am I to be greeted with the hanging canvas sigils you would find lining the walls of a Ko Laga Majeur's den, or perhaps the animal skins and horn entanglement of a steppes warlord's gert?"

He coughed before responding. "To the heart of the matter, then. Nothing so severe, White Hawk. The garden was Duchess Lyoneid's conceit. The statesmen of the palace call our grand diplomatic mission Overtures to the D'jestre in naked semblance to our forefather's Overtures to the Elves.

"Perhaps the day will come when we will send soldiers to fight the bestiary of their lands as well."

She smiled curiously askant with her lips spread thin to the remark; given her disguise as an elf, she guaged she should be at least slighted by it.

It prompted a correction on the captain's part.

"Our goals are no doubt noble in their intended purpose. It may even prove to be the case their mortal struggle like our common cause will be one of great honor, so long as the criminals, the accurséd, and the plague ridden masses are kept far across the sea and on the other side of the craggy steps, the D'jestre are welcomed at our doors."

To this she once more nodded and slowed her mount as they were near their destination. She turned torso to face Bierdé, but lamp posts lining the path illuminated Bierdé's outline in an intense halo while the whole of him remained enveloped in a monotone slate gray.

For a moment, she could not read the intentions on his face at all. Yet, she knew why and she knew what it meant. It was deliberate.

He was veiling himself from her inspection. He made his decision then to steel himself from their previous display of affection towards one another.

Leresai made haste and bid him goodbye.

"I thank you Captain for a most pleasant evening, but it does appear we have arrived."

He galloped ahead of her and he turned his horse around as he opened the gate to a sheltered water trough inviting her to make use of it.

He started to turn away slowly and then turned to face her. His smile was facile and did not sit right with his eyes.

"I have rounds to tend to, White Hawk," he said with a slow easy wave. "This eve has indeed been enchanted."