Chapter 29

I didn’t want to go.

I knew it the way you know a stair is rotten before you put your weight on it. Three hours before the gathering, which was set to last until sunrise, I was walking the length of our bedroom in my slip and stockings, from the window to the wardrobe and back, with the black dress laid across the bed like something that had died there.

For a week I had managed not to think about it. I had read in the evenings and ridden in the mornings and let the house talk round me. Now everything I hadn’t thought about came at once, the way water comes through a cellar wall after a thaw: the whole of the north’s nobility, in one glass room, all looking.

I could not have put a name to half the council. I had seen their signatures on Caspian’s papers, and could have told you which of them pressed hard and which of them blotted badly, but I didn’t know their faces, or their wives’ faces, or what any of them wanted. Nobody had ever taught me how a Luna stands in a