Salt And Sovereignty
The invitation came to her, as she had arranged that it would, in the name of a woman who did not exist. Talia Renn of Ossvik, niece to the honourable Master Denier of the grain comptrollership, was requested, with the third tide of the month of Fellows, to attend upon the reception offered by the Harredine ambassador in the upper hall of the Lantern House, in honour of the Crown-Regent's natal day. She was to come in mourning for an uncle she did not have, which meant dark silks and no jewellery, which meant she would be easier to overlook. Master Denier, who did exist, had been paid three weeks earlier through a cut-out in Sendara, and knew her as an auditor his sister had sent from the north, and would keep his story straight because his pension depended on it. He would not present her. He would only admit her. Being admitted was all she required.
She stood in the anteroom of the Lantern House at the foot of the great stair and looked up, and she did not let the looking show on her face. The hall had been her grandfather's. Her grandfather had hunted boar under the coffers of that ceiling and stood to be painted in the long gallery along the southern wall, and she had run, at four years old, the length of that gallery in stockings with a small terrier at her heels whose name she could no longer remember. The gallery was still there. The terrier was in the ground with