Ossane had received a great many audiences in her life, in the Chancery’s gilt rooms at Sallowmere and in the cold stone parlours of a dozen Lessaran lordships and once, memorably, in a tent at the edge of the Salt Downs with a Dovereach magistrate who had been eating an onion. She knew how to bow. She knew how far, and she had always known to the inch, because the inch was the measure of everything a Crown could afford to say without saying it.
She bowed exactly as far as an envoy must, to the Hold’s nine seats, arranged round the Great Hall’s long table in the dim grey light of the afternoon. Then, because she was not a fool, and because the Chamberlain was watching her from the table’s end with those perfectly steady, faintly amused eyes, she bowed a fraction further, and held it, and let the Hold see that she had chosen to.
The Hold did not know what to do with it. She saw that at once, and was pleased. The Mason looked at her with his heavy brows drawn together, as though he were trying to measure the depth of the bow with his count-cord. The Watchwoman, Ysra, wrote something in a small black book without taking her eyes from Ossane’s face. The Cook, Pell, folded her arms and looked wholly unimpressed, which Ossane respected more than she could have said. The Clerk, Tallow, bent his head over the minute-book with the quick, economical…
