Cassandra
Voting had been taking place all day. There were more than a dozen candidate for the position of Lord General, but only one serious choice. Others might have felt different but they would have been few and far between.
No doubt Frea Dawn was among those, but that would be no great surprise. She hated Clan Lynch, and hated the king of fist more so. Cassandra thought she should thank King Harwyn Lynch. She understood her reasons though. On the one hand the King had launched a war that saw the death of or kin, the King of Highpass, and in stroke made her the most legitimate heir to the throne.
On the other hand, King Harwyn had crowned himself King of Highpass, and taken her throne from her, but she would never have been approved by the House of Lords anyways, not at that age. It had also been King Harwyn’s kin, a cousin of some sort, Osborn Lynch who had betrayed King Rodger Dawn of Highpass. The former Lord General of the Jom had lured the King into a trap in the Creek System where King Harwyn, Lord Worth, and the King of the Wanes had surrounded the small fleet of 70 warships with an force of equal size.
King Rodger had refused to surrender and fought until his death. Although some stories told that he managed to escape. His body was never found, and the voids of space were searched. Frea’s companion Hakon had fought in that battle, even though he was no older than herself. Frea had become the rightful heir to a throne she could never have, and she blamed Edmund as much as she blame King Harwyn or Lord General Osborn.
No one serious considered anyone other their the former Lord Generals brother for the position as leader and General of the Imperial Guard of Jom. Dagfinn Lynch came from a powerful clan, but had also earned his own name fighting for the Jom. The man that others called the Giant was a head taller than most other, and Cassandra wondered if there was another taller than him.
Maybe Cassandra was more basis than others. Her mother was the Lord of the Hearth, one of the powerful lords which served King Harwyn, and her own Grandmother was a Lynch, a sister of King Harwyn himself. Clan Tyr and Clan Lynch had close ties, and the history between them was older than that, much older.
those ties meant that she and Edmund would never be together, but it also meant that in some small way she was voting for her own distant kin when she cast her vote for Dagfinn. One day, Edmund would be king of the Kingdom of Fist after his own father, and she hoped that she would be able to cast a vote in the House of Lords to confirm him, but unlike the position of King, the Lord General of the Jom was elected by all it’s members.
