Lady Ossane Tiller rode up to the arch in the fourth week of the winter wearing the grey cloak of a Chaincrown and carrying nothing in her hands at all.
She came with one clerk and no soldiers. The clerk was a thin young man in Chancery grey with a leather case strapped to his back and a face that looked as though it had been awake since the autumn, and he led her horse on foot through the frost to the gate, where the Watch stood with their spears grounded and their breath going up in the cold. Ossane sat her grey mare with the ease of a woman who had ridden to a great many gates. She wore the Chaincrown’s silver chain over the cloak, the old links polished bright at every bend. Her hair was grey now at the temples and carefully pinned, and her face, which had once been fine and sharp, had softened in the years since the Sallowmere Inquest into something that looked much more dangerous.
“Your Grace,” she said, in the warm, exact voice Idrin had first heard across the Chancery’s table in the second winter. “I bring no threat. I want to say that before anything else, because your Watch has been looking at my clerk’s satchel as if it might contain a sword, and it does not. It contains paper.”
