Chapter 91

My father had opened it. It was his to open.

He had read it once, I thought, and folded it again along its own creases, and when I came into the plain room he was sitting at the table with the jug and the two cups and the letter under his hand, flat, the way Caspian used to lay his hand on the leather folder in council. He did not get up. He waited until I had sat down across from him, and then he took his hand away.

“It is addressed to me,” he said. “It is not about me.”

He turned it round on the wood so that it faced me, and pushed it halfway across the table, and took his fingers off it, as he had once done with a cup of water.

***

The seal was black. The wolf’s head over the crown, broken cleanly through the middle. Wax remembers, Merrit had said. I looked at the two halves and knew without touching them that the hand that had pressed it had pressed it hard, and held it there longer than it needed.

The hand on the page I did not need to