By royal request, Vilon told it all.
He told of what had befallen him on that road, of Rosh, later revealed as the very Vulture lord half a kingdom feared. He told of Martha, the bandits who'd sought to take her by right of steel, and how by force of it they'd found their rest instead among flowers and worms and the cold indifference of the earth.
He told of the hunt that followed, of the skirmish among the trees, of Mariol's death, and finally of the Vulture himself, perished with the weapons the dirt himself made.
Vilon had never once considered himself a great storyteller, all rough edges and blunt phrasing where a proper singer might have found poetry. And yet the longer he spoke, the more he came to realize that what he'd lived through this past year was, by any honest measure, a tale genuinely worth the telling.
