Velvet took the Mouth back, because the Chamberlain kept the house, and the Mouth was a piece of the house’s furniture that somebody else had been sitting on for a quarter of an hour without leave.
She did it without standing. She had learned long ago that a woman who rose in the middle of a Hall was a woman who had lost her footing, and Velvet had never lost her footing in front of anyone. She sat with her hands folded on the table, her shawl drawn tight, and she let the silence in the Hall go on for exactly as long as it took her to find the first word. Then she spoke, and her voice came out of the body’s mouth with the cool clean polish of a sentence that had been rehearsed in a mirror.
“You have the manners of a Chancery copy,” she said.
The stable yard was quiet for the length of a breath. Then the Standing answered, pleasantly, through the Hearth’s grey rail, in Korrin’s broad voice shaped to a Lessaran courtesy that did not belong to it.
“Chancery copies read very well, Chamberlain. They have never once been in a room.”
“Neither have you,” said Velvet. “You have been in a stable.”
