The envoy’s party climbed the causeway road in the middle of the morning, and when it reached the great gate it stopped, because the great gate did not open.
Velvet heard the carts stop. She was in the entrance hall, standing at the foot of the stairs with her back to the receiving-hall door and her hands folded at her waist, because she had come down there to wait and had not yet decided what she was waiting for. She could hear the horses shifting on the flags beyond the arch. She could hear an aide saying something sharp in Lessaran, and a clerk answering him in the careful voice that clerks keep for the moments when they are afraid. She could hear Harrow’s count from the Mason’s Yard, very faint, a number being called out to the stones.
Then she heard the boy.
He was a Lowgate runner with bare feet and a board slung round his neck on a string, and he ran up to the wicket with the Crown’s notice held out in front of him like a dish. Velvet did not see him. She felt him. The wicket was in the great door, and the great door was a thing the body had made and could feel as a hand feels a pocket. The notice on the board said the wicket would be opened for the treaty carts. The boy said it aloud, twice, to the iron. Somewhere in the stones of the gate-house, someone who…
