The mark had spread overnight.
Idrin saw it in the mirror above the washstand, by the light of a single candle, with his coat hung on the door and his shirt pulled down over his shoulders. He had not looked at himself properly in a week. He had shaved in the dark, by feel, with the razor held in his right hand and his left flat on the basin’s rim, and he had not wanted to see the face that came back to him from the glass. He had seen it anyway, once, by accident, in the first grey of the morning, and had turned away from it quickly. It had been a thin, pale, tired face. It had not been the face of a prince.
Now he made himself look.
The Seal began at the centre of the chest, as it always did, a pale crown-shaped mark like the print of a cold hand on glass. It spread from there in fine lines across the collarbone and down toward the shoulder, where it had been since the Articles. He had got used to it. He had got used to the way the marks caught the candle and glowed faintly, as if they were lit from underneath, and to the way they stretched when he lifted his arm. But the mark on the left forearm was new. It ran from the back of the wrist up under the rolled shirt-sleeve, a single bar of pale colour, thin as a thread…
