brand new colony

When Amite's letter arrives, Lanselos has to read it four times over just to get it to make sense to him. It's not that it's badly written or somehow indecipherable -- it's that he can't really get his head around the thought that she's dead. And yet here she is, asking him to take on their son. The letter had been written ahead of time and then dispatched as a provision of her will. You could say a lot of things about Amite Brisen, and God knows he has, but the woman was organized.

The first thing he does is go hunt down someone who'll have been monitoring trade channels and news postings from Escalot, to confirm that this isn't a trick of some kind. (He feels bad about that, but it's her own damn doing, him thinking this way.) But it all checks out -- a hit on her convoy, the same sort of thing that brought him to her the first time, and Amite shot. He doesn't know how to feel about any of it.

Lanselos spends an afternoon locked in Athyr's study, sorting arrangements and getting his head right. (Kind of right, anyway. Athyr always has perspective Lanselos lacks.) Two days later, he's in Escalot, heading toward the Brisen compound to find his son.