The body was hoarse for a day after a Seizing, and so was the prince.
Idrin woke with a throat like a dry gutter and a taste of iron at the back of his tongue, and for some time he could not think why he was lying on the floor of his own bedroom with his coat half off and the morning already grey at the shutters. Then the memory came back, not as a picture but as a sensation: a voice that was not his, pouring out of his own body for eleven minutes, and his own voice gone somewhere beneath it, shouting and not being heard.
He had not slept. He had sat up in the Warden’s chair in the corner of the room until the candle burned out, and then he had gone on sitting in the dark, and somewhere in the small hours he had realised that he had been trying to find the right words for an apology. He had found none. The words he had were the wrong ones. They were the Royal Forms. They were what a prince writes when he has been insulted by a foreign power and wants the insult recorded in the proper hand.
