The banquet was Arameor at its most itself.
That was the thing about a palace that had been afraid — when the fear resolved it did not resolve quietly, it resolved with the specific energy of something that had been compressed and was now expanding back into the space it had been compressed from, filling every available corner with the relief of its own release. The great hall was loud in the way it was only loud when the loudness was genuine rather than performed, when the people in it were making noise because they had something to make noise about rather than because the occasion required it.
They had something to make noise about.
The war was over. The king was home. The border kingdoms had retreated to their borders and the holy war that had been building since a dinner that felt like a lifetime ago had ended on a field three miles from here and the ending was Arameor's.
