The Chancellor came to the Wing himself, which Mireille had not expected and should have.
He was shown into the visiting-room at the change of the warders’ watch, when the gallery was quiet and the drip of the bucket at the far end had slowed to a single tick every few breaths. It was a small square room with a deal table in the middle and two plain chairs, and a barred window high in one wall through which a thin grey light came down onto the wood. Somebody had brought a glass of water and set it at the Chancellor’s elbow. Mireille did not think he would drink it.
He sat down across from her. He folded his gloves on the table beside the glass, one on top of the other, neatly, as a clerk squares a ledger before he begins to read it. Then he looked at her.
It was the same look he had given the river gate at the Hearing, when he came up the road with his twenty-four riders and his clerk’s trunk strapped to the roof. It was a look of pleasure, and of a sum already done. He had grey eyes and very clean hands and a face that had been handsome once and had been made more trustworthy by the years of not needing to be anything else. He did not smile. He did not frown. He only looked at her, with a faint and courteous attention, as if she were a…
