Chapter 384 --384
She would have that information by evening. She would read it with the same careful attention she gave to everything.
The hall was nearly empty.
Cassin Veth left last among the nobles — not by design, she thought, but because his feet had been slower than the rest of him to receive the instruction to move. He walked out with the composure that was no longer natural but was still held, the last professional dignity of a man who had survived forty years by never showing the working.
He was not going to survive this.
She watched him go.
Then she looked at the right side gallery.
Samuel was there, as she had told him to be. Fen beside him, exactly as positioned. He was looking at the door through which the court had left — not at her, not at the throne, at the door, with the expression she recognized as the deep-processing expression, the flood-report quality of attention sorting what he had taken in.
He turned and looked at her.
She held his gaze from the throne.
He did not say anything. He did not need to. The grey eyes said it — the full attention, the acknowledgment, the weight of what he had just watched received and understood and filed in the place where things went that were going to matter for a long time.
She stood from the throne.
She walked the length of the hall.