Idrin read his sister’s letter a second time by the Gatehouse lamp, with Tallow’s plain copy of the sentence folded beneath his cup, and he found that he could not write back in the old manner. He had tried. He had sat down at the clerk’s table with the Chamber’s paper spread before him and the ink ready, and he had begun the way he had been taught to begin letters to anyone who outranked him by blood: To the Princess Mireille Saelmar, from her brother, greeting, and so forth. The pen had stopped on the word greeting. It had stopped as it always stopped now, with a little tremor in the nib, as though the Seal had put a finger on the wrist and told it to wait.
So he put the pen down. He took a fresh leaf, and wrote the first line in the small upright hand Pell had praised, and found that the line came easily, and that the words in it were the ones he had been meaning to say for a year.
Mireille,
You are right about the Crowned. I did not understand what you meant by it until the Chamber voted, and by then the vote was counted and could not be uncounted. I do not blame you for having known first. You were always the one who counted things before the rest of us had finished being frightened of them.
