Chapter 16 · Chapter 16

The lamp in the private wing had been turned down to the one clear pool of light that fell across the desk, and I did not step into it. Three paces of carpet stayed between us. I intended to keep all three.

He did not close them either. He took off the bisht first, drew it from his shoulders in one motion and folded it along its length, the gold edge turned inward, and laid it over the arm of the chair as though that chair were the only thing in the room worth the trouble of care. Without it he was a man in a white thobe and nothing else, and the room grew smaller by exactly that much.

Then he set the folder down.

Not the leather one the elders had passed from hand to hand in the majlis. A thin file, the kind a clerk carries, its corner gone soft from handling. He opened it to the last page and turned it so that it faced the chair opposite him, not his own.

"The agreement," he said. "Not a draft."

"You carried it into a locked room."

"It was in the house before the door closed.