What The Council Already Knows
They kept her at the Crescent House for three days. The cut above her ear was shallow, as such cuts went, and Venna's own physician — a woman who asked no names and left no record — stitched it with four stitches and dressed it with honey and told her she would carry a thin white scar into the line of her hair for the rest of her life, which, the physician said drily, was a small price for a night stroll in that quarter. On the second day Reyna sat at the window of the chamber Venna had kept for her and watched the gulls over the promenade and worked in her head, because nothing else could be safely worked, through the list of names her father had left in the chest.
On the third day, Hest came.
He was admitted through the water-gate, as she had been, and he brought with him a flat leather case, and he sat across from her in the morning room and laid the case on his knees and did not open it.
"The Council met last night," he said. "The second claimant was not named. The absence of the naming is itself a piece of information. They have him ready. They are choosing their hour. That is not what I came to tell you."
"Then tell me what you came to tell me."
"Lady, the Council already knows who you are."
She held his gaze. She did not look away, because looking away would have been the clerk's niece, and the clerk's niece had been retired the night on the quay.
"How long."
"We