The guild hall had been turned back into a hall.
The bedrolls were gone from the cleared end, moved to the gallery and the side rooms. The blanket curtain had been taken down. The long tables had been set out in rows across the floor, end to end, and on them, at intervals, white cards: delegate cards, each with a world’s name or a district’s printed on it, propped up against the water jugs. Cinder. Lorn’s Reach. Tal. Meridian, outer ring. Meridian, city. And smaller ones, for districts and shelters and guilds.
The Lamp Council. Convened under the joint custody terms, the Sunward provisions, to read the census and decide the allocation. Delegates from every lit world, by relay or in person. Mara had not known, until she walked in, how many would come.
She stood at the back of the hall, by the door, with her dressed arm inside her coat sleeve so it would not show.
The hall smelled of wet coats and scorched paper. It had rained in the night, a cold thin rain that froze where it fell, and every delegate had come in through it and hung their coats on the pegs along the wall to drip. And someone had burned something in one of the stoves before the meeting, papers, perhaps, and the smell hung in the high roof.
