Chapter 125

The note came to the archive on Saturday, folded in three, with no seal.

I will answer the archivist’s questions if Lady Elowen is in the room. Nobody else. —V.

I held it to the window. The first stroke of the I went down, and drew back a hair to the left, and went on.

“You needn’t,” said Quill.

“She asked,” I said. “I’d like to know why.”

***

They had kept her in her own rooms in the Chancellor’s house in the town, as the eldest had ordered, with Corwin on the stair and two of Brenna’s wolves in the yard below.

It was a pretty sitting room at the back of the house, over the kitchen wing, with a fire and a window seat and pale green paper on the walls. A writing table stood under the window, empty. Rhys had taken everything off it the morning after the vote, the copybooks and the pens and a box of cream card, and Brenna had them now with numbers on.

Lyra had told it in the hut. At night, in the room over her mother’s k