Lessa is shoveling ashes when she hears Fax and dragonmen approaching her home, Ruatha Hold. She leaps on the opportunity to use the dragonmen to depose Fax so she can claim her birthright, but headstrong as she is, she knows to tread carefully. According to legend, dragonriders do not experience petty emotions like fear and greed and anger: “Dragonriders [are] men apart” (29). Lessa wonders if her premonition in the first scene of the book had to do with their arrival, but she concludes that it did not.

Lessa, it turns out, has been quietly subverting Fax’s power in Ruatha for some time. She killed his first Warder—a competent man whose death she considers regrettable, but necessary—and manipulated the greedy second and third Warders into their graves as well. She will stop at nothing to depose Fax: “If all Ruatha fell to the Threads, it would be better than remaining dependent on Fax! The heresy shocked Lessa even as she thought it” (31). Lessa uses her psychic powers to ruin the welcoming feast for Fax and the dragonmen.