Adala Leufroy had attended countless banquets, including what should have been the coronation of a marquis, and she could say with some authority that she had never seen seating arranged half so shrewdly as it had been arranged tonight on the southern wall of Lothian City.
To the untrained eye it was hospitality. There were braziers set along the top of the wall, mulled wine going around in dented cups, and even benches dragged up from the gatehouse for the elderly and the important. But Adala's eye had been trained in the Kingdom of Iron, where hospitality was understood to be a weapon like any other, and she had spent the last hour cataloguing the guest list with growing admiration.
Over by the second set of braziers, Adala spotted a goldsmith famous enough in Lothian March that his name was known even in the baronies, along with the master of the local Carters whose wagons carried half the apples and cider her family sold outside of their own barony.
