I read a Hammered Heart excerpt...

... with the most terrible and hard to understand accent ever to accent! Go me.

Transcript of the Hammered Heart excerpt I'm reading

For that moment when you realize you can't tell what I'm saying at all. (My apologies!)

The Bridges’ criers were handed the message from the Guild of scribes around noon.

They saw that their copies included red script on Fata paper, in a town where both were reserved for royal use.

They travelled through streets already ablaze with the rumours of what had happened at the waterfront. Another assassination attempt, it was whispered, and the Regent had been involved. This made citizens uneasy, and no small few, aware the region owed much of its safe prosperity to the rule of Fates, fumed.

These town criers set up on their corners and took out their sheets. They saw that entire lines were red, and the first words on their copy—An Torr enn an Interrex—were known to every one of them. This message came from The King and the Regent.

Then the news hit.

Ora could hear the crier who would shelter at Kessian’s outside.

An Torr enn an Interrex require all people of Bridges to proceed to their homes at once. In an orderly manner, each must leave their situation, market, school, and all other places, and lock inside their homes. Go now. Travellers to town, must be ushered into shelter without fear of cost, just as every sailor must be situated on ship or shore. All innocents must lock in.

Afterward, none are to emerge or admit strangers.

River and road will be patrolled by Town Guards, Outriders, and the dreaded Morgwn Knights.

All have permission to destroy.

If your life be precious, stay inside. Shelter.

The King of the Fates and his sections will hunt tonight.

There will be no quarter.

The dockyards became a state of confusion. At first, people couldn’t seem to believe the news. A fire of conversations and suppositions erupted across the spaces—was this about the dragons? The attempted assassination? Something new? But, when the Guard began to march through the city, and the Knights rode into town—when the Outriders blew into the grove beside Kessian’s manor house—the downtown drained quickly. Even those people who loved to see the Fata sections appear and considered it the height of fanfare. The citizens saw everyone so chillingly armed. Carriages and carts waited to take those workers who lived further out, and they were wide eyed at the amassment of troops in the downtown.

For all the human vacillation, the evacuation was as orchestrated as the locks high in the mountains by Blue Mirror Lake were. All planned to flow like water through the rivers by the Regent, himself.

Hovel, hotel, and manor house, even the warehouses were full with people, some of whom had elected to stay there just to protect the place that assured them a livelihood. Schools were full. Even the bathhouse was occupied. The field and streets inside the White City were full of traders who had travelled here in their bow topped caravans. Everywhere was packed.