Idrin went down to the bone-room with Tallow’s permission and Sella’s, carried in a chair by two Lowgate men because she could no longer manage the stair on her own.
The men set her down by the slope, between the ash boards and the lamp, and went back up the stone steps without speaking. They had been told to wait at the stair-head, and Idrin heard their boots stop there, and then their voices low in the passage, arguing softly about who would carry her up again. Sella did not seem to hear them. She sat in the chair with the blanket to her chin and the bone-ledger open on her knees, and her face in the lamplight was the colour of old candle-wax, with two spots of fever high on the cheekbones and her eyes very bright.
“Sit down, Your Grace,” she said. “You make the room look untidy standing up.”
He sat on the step by the door. He had been meaning to come down for days. He had been afraid to come, though he would not have said so, and he saw in her face now that she knew it, and had decided not to make him say it aloud.
