Sefra sat in her tent on the far bank of the Sallow with the lamp turned low and tried to choose a word for herself, and failed, as she had failed every night since she had first worn a shape she did not own.
The tent was a Corvanne tent, grey canvas on a frame of ash-poles, with a camp-bed folded against one wall and a trunk at its foot that held nothing but three coats and a letter from the Iron Court that she had not yet opened. It smelled of wet wool and horse. Outside, the camp was quiet. The Corvanne company had built its fires in a line along the bank, and the smoke came up through the willows in long grey threads that the wind pulled sideways, so that the whole valley looked as though it were being slowly unravelled.
She had been, that day, a Commander of the Hollowed, and an envoy of the Iron Court, and a woman with grey at her temples who had read a census roll aloud to a surveyor and been corrected on her distances. She had worn all three in turn and none of them had fitted. Now she sat on the camp-bed with her hands in her lap, and the word for the person who had worn them would not come.
