Peregrine Aske rode out of the Hold at dawn with his book in his coat, his clerk beside him, and three of the four riders who had come with him up the Lessary Road.
He thought, as the riders settled into their saddles in the yard, about his mother’s table at Sallowmere, which had been laid for six every evening for as long as he could remember and had never once been laid for him by name. He had grown up in its shadow. He had been the one at the end of it, the second son, asked to pass the salt and told to mind his manners when the Assembly’s men came to dine. He had thought, at the Hold’s barley table, with the Warden’s cup beside his and the Lash’s boot scraping under the bench, that it was the first meal he had eaten since he was a boy where nobody had asked him to be useful. He had been listened to. Once or twice he had been asked a question he could not answer. He had not expected to mind going, and he minded it a good deal.
The Chamberlain’s plain apology had stayed with him too, all the way down the Hold’s corridor and into the Chamber, and it had gone on staying through the signing. He could still hear her voice, flat and bare, the voice of a woman who had stopped being a courtier in the middle of a sentence and had not yet…
