Chapter 30: The Ashen Throne

The morning came in without ceremony.

Grey light through the hall's repaired eastern shutters, three of them still warped from the burning and admitting thin lines of cold air that stirred the candle flames on the record table without extinguishing them. Mara had arrived before the delegates and had set out the proceedings log and the convention transcription and the draft compact in its three weighted sections, the same way she had set them out on each of the six previous days, because consistency of arrangement was a form of institutional memory and she had learned, in the past months, to trust the accumulation of small consistencies against the erosion of larger ones.

She had not slept.