Chapter 2: The Queen's Antechamber

The antechamber smelled of beeswax, rosewater, and something underneath both that Elspeth could not immediately name — something that belonged to rooms where powerful people waited and smaller people stood still and hoped not to be noticed. She catalogued it in three breaths and then stopped cataloguing, because a woman cataloguing was a woman with an active face, and an active face was the one thing she could not afford before she had learned which faces in this room were reading hers.

There were six of them already assembled when she arrived, attended by a harried-looking woman of perhaps fifty who introduced herself as Lady Meredith Crane, senior lady-in-waiting, in the tone of someone for whom the title was load-bearing in every sense. Lady Meredith had the eyes of a woman who had survived the court by being necessary, and the tight, assessing quality of her glance told Elspeth that she was already being filed somewhere: minor house, no alliances, no fortune, negligible. Good. That was exactly the shelf she wanted.

She curtseyed to Lady Meredith with the practiced depth of a woman who had been curtsying since she could walk, and received in return a nod that was not precisely warm but was not hostile either. Neutral ground. She would take it.