Velvet had been dreading the witness bench for three days, and she had dressed for it accordingly. She wore the grey Chamberlain’s coat with the silver buttons that had belonged to her mother, and a high-collared blouse of Corvanne silk that she had been saving for an occasion she had not yet been able to name, and her hair was pinned up in the old Foundation style that no woman in the Hold had worn since the Edict of the Forms. She had had the Kitchen’s girl press the blouse twice. She had smoothed the coat herself, at the window, with the flat of her palm, until the nap lay down the right way. A Chamberlain did not sit before a Chancery magistrate in a crumpled coat. A Chamberlain stood, if she was made to stand, and sat only when she had been given leave, and then only as a courtesy to the one who had given it.
She sat now, because Master Dorr had asked her to, and because the prince had nodded, very slightly, from the chair at the rail. She folded her gloves in her lap. She kept her eyes off the lodgers’ rail. She looked at the magistrate.
