The receiving-hall was the one room in Ormhold that had been built to be looked at, and Velvet had spent a great deal of her life making sure it was. The walls were panelled in pale ash from the marsh-edge, rubbed with beeswax until they gave back the candle-light like the inside of an old cup. The long window faced the river gate. The hearth was laid with split birch and lit only at the moment a guest was announced, because a fire that burned before the guest arrived was a fire that had been wasted on an empty room. The prince’s chair stood at the rail, with its back to the wall, and the lark-cups on their silver stand caught the afternoon light from the window and threw small bright coins across the floorboards.
She had arranged all of it herself, that morning, with Harrow’s boys to carry the stand and the Kitchen’s girl to polish the cups. She had not told the Kitchen’s girl that the cups were polished because a Lessaran herald was coming. The girl would have heard it at the Kitchen fire by noon, and then it would have been the whole Hold’s business, and a thing the whole Hold knew could not be properly received.
