Idrin went to the receiving-hall at the candle-clock’s third turn and sat in the chair before its shut door, because Velvet had asked him once, in a note that Pell had carried up the passage, to sit there when he had something to say that a Chamberlain ought to hear.
The chair was a plain gilt thing with a split in one arm, and it had been set against the wall beside the door by someone who had been told to put it in the right place and had not been told what the right place was. Idrin sat in it with his good hand on his knee and his bad hand held against his ribs, and he looked at the door, which was oak, very old, and painted once in a cream that had long since gone the colour of weak tea. A brass knocker in the shape of a hand hung from its centre. The hand’s fingers were worn smooth where generations of petitioners had lifted it and set it down again.
The receiving-hall beyond the door was empty. He knew that. He had been inside it once, in the early winter, when the Seizing was still a thing that Hands spoke of in low voices, and the room had been swept, the floor clean and the tall windows polished and the long table where the Lessaran envoy had once been received left bare of cloth. Somebody had swept it since. Somebody had not been paid for the…
