Chapter 13 · Untitled Chapter

Nobody moved. The brazier ticked once and settled into itself.

The Finger took his hand off the Finjan. He did not look at the cup, or at the boy who had poured it, or at me. He looked at the middle distance of his own majlis, the way a man looks at a ledger he has already balanced twice.

"Say it again," he said.

I said it again.

Cold came off him. Not heat — nothing in that room had ever been hot. It was the cold of a man doing arithmetic quickly and finding the sum not to his liking, and finding, worse, that the arithmetic had been done out loud in front of his guests.

"You have been in the gallery," he said.

"I have."

"All evening."

"Longer than this evening."

The room adjusted. I heard it the way you hear a door settle somewhere else in a house. Men who had been leaning back came forward by the width of a finger. The one who had been telling the story about the horses stopped with his mouth still shaped around the next word.

The Finger smiled.