Once Juhel returned to his seat, the hall didn't stay quiet for long before a woman in her middle years stood up from her place beside one of Tybal Aleese's knights.
"Sir Berian Taaffe was my father," the middle-aged woman, Lady Loann, said as she looked around the room seeing so many familiar faces now scattered across the room instead of clumping together the way they usually did. Many of her oldest friends were closer to her in this seating arrangement, where before, there had always been a wide separation between the southern families like the one she'd married into and the northern families where she'd been born.
It was better this way, and she drew strength from her friends now as she spoke of the man she'd once reviled for trading her away in exchange for three good horses and a few dozen bales of grain.
