Chapter 54

I heard it through the window.

Luna’s rooms were two: the bedroom, over the rose walk, and a narrow sitting room beyond it with a desk and one tall window that looked down on the forecourt and the long drive and, a quarter of a mile off, the gate. Nana Odette had sat up in the chair by my bed until four. At seven she went down for a tray. At ten past, the gravel in the forecourt began to fill.

I went through to the sitting room in my nightgown and stood at the side of the tall window, behind the edge of the curtain, and looked down.

Both courts were there.

On the steps of the house: the council in their dark coats, Valerian at the top in grey with his hands folded, Odile a step behind him. Rhys. Twenty of Caspian’s wolves along the gravel in a line. On the forecourt below them, the Seelie party, with its trunks already strapped onto the cars—Isadora in a travelling cloak, her secretary clutching his little book against his chest, Saskia. Lucien, bareheaded, w