Chapter 82

The Silvaran council sat on my ninth morning in Ellisar, and the King did not speak for me.

He had told me the night before that he would not. He had stood on the threshold of my mother’s rooms, the way he always stood there until I nodded him in, with his hands folded behind his back so that I could see he was keeping them there.

“They will ask you things I would not let anyone ask you,” he said. “I will let them. If I answer for you, they will see a king who wants a daughter. They must see you, not my belief.”

I had taken the slate from Rowan and written GOOD. I had been tried once by a council that did not want to see anything at all. A council that meant to look was a different animal.

***

The council room was built into the crook of one enormous tree, its living wood coming up through the floor, grey and ridged like an old man’s knuckles. Eleven chairs at a table of the same wood. Light lay across it in bars, like rulers on a page.

They gave