"Mama's Boy"

Mikhail wrote it for one man and sang it where that man could not help hearing it: a song about Beltran Grayeras’s incompetence, the slave ring he paid for, and his mother’s hand in giving him up. It took the three in that order. None of it was news to the singer. Most of it was news to Haudh-Gwenn, which had lived under Beltran since he took control of the guard and been told none of it.

He sang it in the road outside the burning Color Stay, to three hundred strangers he had spent the evening turning into an audience. Voler Bria had set fire to his own inn to pull a Krelene fire-festival into the street, and the Valiant Few had come to announce publicly that they were alive and to bring Beltran outdoors to fight them. The song was the announcement. It ran out of Beltran and into the Few’s own theme, and the disguises came off on the chorus: three people the city had buried, standing in its street in their own faces. The crowd had the chorus by then, and was singing it back when Beltran walked out of the inn into the middle of it.

The crowd took the whole thing for a rehearsed show and played along, pressing his guards out of the square and leaving him in the open with the three of them. It cheered through everything that came after, including his death.