In a Wicked Age
four oracles

anyway.
A Penny for Your Thoughts

Blood & Sex

10D: A note written in an elegant hand, sweetly perfumed.

QD: A happy girl, promised in marriage to a gentleman, naive to the danger he represents.

5D: A chattel slave who has broken both his bonds and his master's skull.

9D: The secluded home of an exiled court-wizard.

God-kings of War

10D: The country fort, made mostly of mud bricks, of a local warlord.

QD: An executioner, a strangler, in service to a ruthless king.

5D: The arrival of unexpected and improbable allies.

9D: A much-decorated company of the enemy's light cavalry.

the Unquiet Past

10D: The young, beautiful wife of an old man whom the gods have touched.

QD: The fey and unfriendly guardians of an enchanted glade.

5D: A gutted tower, home to many birds.

9D: A camp physician, her pockets full of salves and drugs.

a Nest of Vipers

10D: The written deed to a certain house, affirmed and sealed.

QD: A poor home shared by many families of beggars.

5D: The solemnization of treaty between two neighboring principalities, negotiated in the face of brutality and assassination, brave and hopeful but quite doomed.

9D: The corpse of a lord's hunting hound, caught in a rose-briar.