Mireille found Idrin in the Ink-room at night, drawing.
He had a stub of charcoal from the Forge in one hand and a sheet of the Chancery’s grey paper, saved from the winter, flattened on the scarred table under the lamp. He was trying to draw their brother from memory. She saw it as soon as she came through the door, before she had seen his face, because the posture was one she knew: the head bent low, the good hand moving in short hard strokes, the bad hand flat beside the paper to hold it still. It was the posture of a man who had been asked to write a letter he did not want to send, and had decided to draw the letter instead.
She did not speak at once. She stood in the doorway in her grey coat with the Chancery’s cold still on her shoulders, and she watched him draw.
He had the jaw right. He had always had the jaw right. It was the square, heavy, impatient jaw of the Saelmar men, which their father had had and their grandfather, and which Corvin had grown into at twenty with an expression of such settled dignity that the Lessaran court had called it a gift from the old crown. Idrin had caught it exactly. The line of the cheek came down to it cleanly, and the mouth was there, thin and pressed, the mouth of a man who had signed a great many things he did…
