Chapter 58

They came for me on the sixteenth of October, as the light began to go.

I had been ready since noon, sitting at the desk in my riding coat with my hands folded on Persuasion. They let me bring the book, with the writ inside it at the ragged place, and Rowan’s apple-wood Mist in my coat pocket. Nothing else. The rest stayed, and I looked at all of it on the way to the door, the way I would have run my eye down a page before handing it in: the bed, made square. The books on the shelf. The silver paper-knife on the desk, squared to the edge.

Bram locked the door behind us. Then, because he had been told to, he gave the key to the man waiting on the landing.

I knew that man. Not his name; his face. He had held the white mare’s bridle at the Fair while Vivienne was lifted into the saddle. He wore a plain brown riding cloak now, and under it, where it fell open at the collar, the dark green of the Chancellor’s household.

“For the inventory, Luna,” he said, a