#esbern

But when the council finally begins, kings and warriors crowded around the long stone table, she is silent. An argument begins immediately, Ulfric objecting to Thalmor presence within the negotiations and Tullius objecting to his objection, and it splinters off into something thorny and onerous. It takes half an hour for discussion to begin properly – and then someone says something and they’re off again, everyone around the table coiled tight and wary, and the Dragonborn stares into the middle distance and offers no thoughts.

It doesn’t stop, the talk of trading holds like game pieces and demands that the armies’ leaders be compensated for massacres that never touched them. Arngeir tries to quiet them, and Esbern’s desperate passion riles them up, and when half of the room has leapt to its feet and voices echo off High Hrothgar’s sacred, watching stones, the Dragonborn finally speaks –

Which is to say, she claps her hands over her ears and spits a Word that rips the voices from their lips and the room is finally, mercifully silent.

Her housecarl, the only one who does not seem startled by this, places a hand on the back of her chair and says, “Thane?”

The Dragonborn uncurls, removes her hands from her head, lays them flat on the table.

“I don’t understand,” she says, slow, as though the words are weighed down. She isn’t looking into the middle distance; her eyes shift from face to face like she is trying to meet everyone’s gaze at once.

Galmar Stone-fist, standing by a chair to her right, claws at his fur-lined collar. “We have –”

“Let the Dragonborn speak,” Lydia interrupts, voice and eyes steely. Galmar’s face twists, but he falls silent.

The Dragonborn presses her hands into the stone tabletop.

“Do you believe,” she says, “that the dragons will leave your side alone?”

On the other side of the table, General Tullius raises a sceptical brow. He leans back into his chair. “If you have a point, then make it. We don’t have time for more nonsense.”

Her eyes snap to him. Lydia repeats, “Let her speak.”

The Dragonborn holds up a hand.

“Do you believe,” she enunciates carefully, “that the dragons care anything for your war? None of this matters.”

“On the contrary –”

“Alduin will tear your cities down,” she tells them. Her eyes are eerie dark as holes too deep to track, and even her housecarl is staring at her now. “Only I can stop it. Until you get out of my way, you are fighting over rubble.”

There is, again, silence. Arngeir is visibly thankful for the reprieve; High Hrothgar’s walls, unused as they are to such uproar, can once again, if briefly, know peace.

Ulfric stood up sometime in the yelling; he has not sat back down. He is leaning a little on the stone back of his chair as he says, “You called us here in hopes of a ceasefire, Dragonborn. Truces aren’t made of empty air. Terms have to be negotiated.”

The Dragonborn stares him down. Her palms remain flat on the table; her sword stays resting against her chair.

“But you aren’t negotiating with him,” she says, the words still heavy, still slow. “You’re negotiating terms with me.”

There is a pause. The watchful stones soak in the silence.

“With you,” the Legate replies.

The Dragonborn’s face is blank. “If you truce, I will fight Alduin.” She speaks the weighed-down words as though they are the most natural thing in the world. “If you don’t, I won’t. Your cities will fall as Helgen, and you will die afraid. Those are my terms.”

Lydia places a hand, palm up, on the table. The Dragonborn covers it with her own, mimicking the pose of the wrist, the splay of the fingers.

“Now,” the Dragonborn announces, her voice a laggard echo of Arngeir’s opening speech, “who would like to begin the negotiations?”