The Champion’s Companion 17
Mara walked into the Palace grounds confident the guards wouldn’t see through her disguise. Clean up of the massacre inside the Palace was taking a while, and continued into the night. Lights turned night to day and bustling servants in bloody livery rushed in and out cleaning and searching through her handiwork in the mess of the devastated Palace. The bodies under the sheets of the men who passed Mara’s blade lined across the ground to the right with small tents of other recovered items from the thrashed interior. For her, the smell of their blood and fear around her lit nose and fired her loins. To the left, the Queen sat in metal plated hardened leather cavalry armor at a desk with her back to a huge white carriage that seemed ready to move …