Velvet had folded the Regent’s gloves four times since noon. Idrin knew because he had passed the receiving-hall door four times, and each time she had been bent over the same pair on the same table, smoothing a seam that had been straight when she started.
“They have never looked better,” she said when he came in. She kept her eyes on the seam. “Your bearing has improved, Highness. I did not think a pair of gloves could do so much for a man.”
“They have been in a drawer since the Charter of Recovery.”
“Then the drawer has been very kind to them.” She laid the gloves down and turned to him, and gave him the full courtesy of the receiving-hall, the one she kept for envoys and for princes who had not been out in the rain. “I should like a private word, if the Regent can spare his evening.”
He could. He had come up from the Great Hall with the evening’s minutes under one arm and a headache behind his right eye, and he would have sat down with a sack of grain if it had asked him politely. Velvet did not ask him politely. She asked him as a Chamberlain asks a prince, which was to say with every word weighed for the back of the room.
