Dorian let his gaze drift slowly around the spacious chamber, the late afternoon light casting long golden beams across the newly polished stone floors. It was almost strange, surreal even, to think how much this once-forgotten corner of the world had changed in just three short years. Yarzat—this dusty, crumbling backwater once whispered about in courtly halls as Romelia's overgrown garden.
It was tempting to focus on the obvious: the cobbled streets that no longer turned to rivers of mud with the first rain, the sturdy aqueducts that sang water through the fountains of every square, and the ancient walls that had been scrubbed clean and crowned with new battlements. Yet Dorian knew the real transformation ran deeper than stone and mortar. It was political. It was the spirit of the place that had changed.
Yarzad had risen alongside its unlikely master—the so-called Peasant Prince. What a joke that name had once seemed, but no one was laughing now.
