Marguerite Kedros runs the Savannah Conclave from a white-columned mansion that mundane eyes can't see, hidden in the woods behind the Old Powder Magazine. She is a dryad, and her magic is older than Georgia has been a state. It rolls off her in slow rings, like the growth rings of a tree, and it belongs specifically to this place, to the marsh and the cordgrass and the long hot summers. She is very tall. Her hair is the gray-green of Spanish moss, her skin the warm brown of mahogany with a texture like fine-grained bark, and she is barefoot on the marble of her own lobby and on the hot asphalt of a public street.
She doesn't raise her voice. When she crouches down to speak to a man who has just thrown fire across a square, he goes from demanding a lawyer to staring at his shoes in under two minutes. She is spending the book holding a city together with both hands: three families with stolen children, a pyromancer feud one spark from open war, and every Mythical bloodline in Savannah asking her whether their kids are safe. She gives Gideon a badge and a gun before he has finished his training, because she will not send him into grieving, dangerous homes with empty hands.
