Brynja Vornmar believes the Strømgodden are betraying their dead. To her the answer to three hundred years of enslaved kin is the only answer her people have ever honored: the rite-armor, the charge, a host driven south through Nashua and into Gorath to free the Drasnians or die in the trying. She worships Trømgodd, who witnesses the wounds a dwarf takes going into a line he does not mean to leave, and she cannot stomach a war fought with bribed clerks and laundered fees. Gold, she tells the Warcouncil, is what the slavers themselves deal in. To free dwarves with it is to fight the enemy in his own coin and call the result a victory.
She is right that the cold war is unglorious. She is wrong that hers could work, and that is the hard knot of her. The Strømgodden have thrown themselves at the Nashua front for longer than anyone keeps a clean count, and the Ix'Vasyla have not broken; a host that abandoned that line to march on Gorath would lose the mountains at its back. Brynja knows the numbers. She discounts them, because the creed she lives by holds that the manner of a death outranks its result, and a glorious charge that frees no one is still, to her, the truer act than a ledger that frees a hundred.
That conviction puts her at the throat of Grøndar Kaldmar, whose counting-room she would gladly see closed. Neither corrupt nor a fool, she is the most honest believer on the council, which is exactly what makes her dangerous. If Veramus dies and the hawks take the chamber in the heat of it, Trømgar could spend its army on a magnificent, useless charge at the one moment patience might have meant something, and bury the Drasnian rising under its own glory.
We are dwarves who taught our children that how you die is the whole of what you are. And now we pay clerks. Tell me which of our dead would forgive us that. — Brynja Vornmar, before the Warcouncil