Velvet woke in the receiving-hall by her own trade, and she was not at all surprised to find that the Hold had kept her waiting for it.
She knew the moment. She had known it for a season, in the long grey stillness of her Quiet, as a seamstress knows the day a cloth is to be cut. The receiving-hall’s door was opened. An envoy had come up the Hold’s front road under a Lessaran canopy, with a clerk and a case and a voice that could make a Chamber sit up, and the Hold had let her in, by the front, through the great oak doors that had been built for exactly this purpose, and the act of opening those doors was a Chamberlain’s act. It was the one act in the whole of the Hold that belonged to Velvet by right. She had been waiting for it since the day her Form was spent, and recast, and given back to her, and she had dreamed of it every night in the Lantern Hall with her lamp lit and her seat empty and nobody sitting in the chair beside it.
Now the chair beside her was not empty. It was the Survey seat, which Lune’s Walk had freed when the surveyor walked out of the Hold, and she could feel its weight settle into the Hold’s count like a cup into its saucer, very exact, very right.
