The Hold’s report reached Lady Ossane Tiller at the eleventh hour of the morning, in the upper ink-room of the Chancery at Sallowmere, and she read it the way she read everything she had been sent by an enemy: slowly, from the first line to the last, and then again from the last to the first, to see what the author had been careful not to say.
The room was small and warm and smelled of scented sand. It had been the Chancellor’s own copying-room before the Chancellor had grown too stout for the stairs, and it still had his desk, a long table of pale oak with a brass rail round its edge, and his chair, which was too large for her and which she had never once sat in. She sat at the side table, under the window, where the light came in from the courtyard and fell across the paper without glare. She had chosen the side table on her first day in the building. She had said, to the clerks who brought her tea, that an envoy ought to be able to see her own hand while she wrote.
She saw her hand now. It was steady.
