Ossane had decided, on the second day of her stay, that a claim was easier to lose in a room with a view.
The lodgers’ annex sat off the Great Hall’s east end, through a low door that had once been a storeroom and still smelled faintly of onions and rope. It had one window, wide and unshuttered, and through the window you could see the grey roofs of Lowgate running down the slope toward the stream, with their chimneys smoking and their washing hung in the lanes and the goats moving about the upper fields like slow dark stones. It was not the sort of room the Chancery would have given a guest. It was the sort of room the Chancery would have liked to hide a clerk in, if it had ever needed one to be happy.
Tallow had brought the tea. He had made it himself, in a Foundation pot with a cracked lid, and he had brought two cups that did not match and a jar of honey that he had clearly been saving for a better occasion. He poured with the care of a man measuring out an ink, and he set her cup on the table within reach of her hand, and then he sat down opposite her with his own cup untouched and his pen laid neatly beside the saucer, and waited.
