Quinlan Elysiar stood at the altar in Miri Town's square with ten empresses holding onto him and a sky coming down in pieces over all of them.
The shards of the Heavenly Restriction were still falling.
Panes the size of provinces turned over in the noon light, thinned to clear, and were gone before they ever reached his daughter's white canopy. Beyond them the blue went on forever.
The square was screaming. Ten thousand throats, every cub, every dwarf, every elf along the aisle, and under all of it a deeper roar rolling in from the streets, from the towns, from a whole continent watching the same sky.
Then a child's voice came up out of the cobbles.
"Rosie's turn!!"
It came out of the stone under the altar and out of every road on Iskaris at once, solemn and delighted in the same breath. Every soul standing on one of those roads heard it in the same moment.
"The Eternal Tree keeps her promise!"
High above the falling glass, the light changed.
