Idrin asked for his sister.
He asked plainly. He had decided on the stair, in the grey before the bridge, that he would not dress the question up, and he had kept to that through the whole long morning of the King’s clauses and the lease and the folded third, and now that he was standing on the last whole stone with the rain in his eyes and the river loud under him, he found that the plainness was all he had left.
“I want Mireille released,” he said. “From the Quiet Wing. Now.”
Corvin did not answer straight away. He stood with the folded lease under his arm and looked at his brother, and there was a line between his eyebrows that had not been there at the lease.
“She is in the Quiet Wing,” said the King, “on a warrant of the Quiet Census. She read the struck names in the Assembly’s own hall, Idrin, in front of the Seats, and she was arrested for reading them. The Seats were very angry. I do not blame them. A Saelmar who reads the Crown’s own strike-offs in the Crown’s own hall is a Saelmar who has taken the first step herself.” He paused. “She struck her own name, with her own initials, from the Crown’s book. That is what the Chancellor will say to the Assembly, and it is true enough to be dangerous.”
