The private audience was held with the receiving-hall door standing open, as the prince had insisted. Ysra stood on the threshold, because a door was hers to count, and nobody had ever told her she could not stand in one.
She counted it all the same. There were eleven steps from the Great Hall to the dais at the far end of the receiving hall, and eleven was the number she had counted the night before, and the number she would count tomorrow. There were nine oak panels in the door. There were two hinges on the left that squealed when the wind came off the Sallow, and that had not squealed once since the Chamberlain had opened the door for the envoy, because the envoy had not been the sort of visitor a hinge complains to. She had noticed that the night before, too. She noticed everything about the door now, as a tongue keeps finding a broken tooth.
Aske sat on a low chair beside the dais with his clerk at his elbow and his book open on his knee. The Chamberlain stood on the dais in her blue coat. Her hands were folded. Her voice was pleasant and very careful, like a woman walking across a frozen pond, testing each step before she trusted her weight to it.
