Chapter 11 · Chapter 11

The corridor between the majlis and the far wing is thirty-two paces. I have known that number since I was a girl walking it with a tray I was not allowed to spill, and it has never taken me as long as it took that morning.

Behind me the hall did not rise. That was its own sentence, and it was not addressed to me. A majlis rises for the head of a house and for a guest it means to keep. It stayed seated, and the seating said what seating always says in this city: not yet, not you, not while we are still deciding.

My uncle was standing where the carpet of the reception rooms gives way to the plain stone of the wing passage, and he did not follow me past that line. He is a careful man. He has spent forty years being careful in rooms where carelessness is a career, and he knows the boundary of that passage the way he knows the boundaries of a contract.