Lazar Berezov

Lazar Berezov has been holding the Berezov territory together for twenty years. He held it through his brother's illness, through his brother's death, through the transition to a lord younger than anyone at the council table. He sits at Voronets and speaks for the house. He knows the names of every lord at the table, every appetite, every grudge. He does the work. He always has. He read the journal before his brother locked it in the chest. He knew. Every generation a curious grandson finds it, has the crisis, and puts it back because the alternative is worse. He had planned to let Andrei do the same. Instead his nephew rode north and did not come back and the land began to fail and a practitioner arrived from the east with a solution and a smile and dark eyes and the smell of clove and bitter almond and for weeks the questions he should have been asking dissolved in the warmth of her presence before he could ask them. He stood over his nephew on the bank with a dagger in his hand and a woman who had been in a river for two centuries screaming the boy's name from the shallows and his brother's eyes looking up at him from three feet away. He drove the dagger into the right person.

A darker shade of blue eyes than Andrei's. The Berezov jaw gone broader and heavier with age. Gray at the temples.

Competent. Direct. He has been the adult in the room for so long he has forgotten there are other ways to stand in it. He is right about almost everything. The covenant was failing, the territory needed governance, the council would not wait. He is wrong about one thing: whether the woman in the river deserves to stay in it. He is not cruel. He is institutional. He sees a problem and solves it. He raised a boy who became a lord who opened a chest who freed a woman who is now sleeping in a bed on the second floor of his estate, and the estate's wells are full and the crops are growing and the land does not need the ward and it is possible, he allows, that he has been wrong about a great deal.