Page 109 of Flames and Blood

“She’s been through an ordeal, Erran,” another replies.

“I know that, thank you. I was speaking about the cloth.”

“How long does this take?” I ask.

“Not long.”

It takes two hours.

Two hours. Four floors under this room, a man who came here for me is sitting in the dark, and I am standing on a box while three women argue about a waist seam.

Halfway through, Hesper puts her head in with a cup of something hot and hands it to me without asking whether I want it, which is the only decision anybody makes on my behalf all morning that I actually like.

The council chamber is a long room with a long table and eleven people who have all been sitting in the same chairs for as long as I can remember.

“The grain stores need attention,” says one. “There’s less in the north cellars than there should be.”

“Most likely the damp,” someone replies.

“The last crop wasn’t good,” someone else responds. They bounce this around until I think my head’s going to explode, and not one of them is willing to say the word “theft” out loud. They finally put it to bed, and a grizzled elder at the end of the table raises a hand.

“The boundary,” he says. “There’s a shepherd on the Corrin side who has been letting his animals up our ledges for six summers. We should do something about it.”

“Raising it now would look like weakness,” someone points out.

They haggle it for forty minutes and decide to raise it in the spring. Which is what they decided last year.

Then it’s whose turn it is to hold the midwinter ceremony, and the answer is Vessa’s family, and it has been Vessa’s family for three hundred years, and they discuss it anyway.

I sit at my mother’s right hand, and I keep my face calm and look at all eleven of them. One of these people, or somebody they drink with, stood at my graveside and knew. I’m going to be in rooms like this one every day for the rest of my life, smiling at whoever it was.

Somebody down the table says the word “customarily” for the ninth time, and I put my thumbnail into the pad of my finger to have something to feel.

Nobody in this room is frightened. I’m the only one at this table who knows what it’s like to be taken out of my own life, and they’re arguing about catering.

God, help me.

It occurs to me, an hour in, that I have not spoken since I sat down and that not one person has noticed.

So I speak.

“I want to ask about the funeral.”

The table stops.

Two people look at my mother. One looks at the ceiling. Aldis, who is standing at the door because he has decided that’s where he lives now, looks at his own boots.

“That’s a heavy thing for a council morning,” somebody says.

“It’s the only clear hour they’ve given me all week.”

“There’ll be time—”

“There’ll be less time every day. Who found the body?”

Nobody answers.

“A recovery party went out,” I say. “Somebody led it. Somebody carried her down. Somebody decided who she was. I want the names and the order they happened in.”