Lady Ossane Tiller arrived in the first week of the new year with four clerks, a sealed case of Lessaran papers, and a manner so courteous that Idrin had been on his feet for a quarter of an hour before he realised he had risen to greet her.
She came up the Lamentine road on a grey horse with a white blaze, dressed in the plain dark green of the Chancery’s lawyers, with a travelling cloak thrown back over her shoulders and her hair pinned close under a black felt hat. She was not young. She was not old either. She had the look of a woman who had spent her life in rooms where nobody raised a voice, and who had learned from them that the quietest sentence in a room was always the one that would be remembered.
She was waiting at the bar when the Regent came down to meet her, with her clerks behind her in a line and her hands folded on the head of her ebony cane.
“Highness,” she said, and bowed. It was a perfect bow, neither too low nor too high. “I am Ossane Tiller, for the Chancery of Lessary. I believe we have corresponded.”
