Chapter 11: Baelish Makes His Opening Move

Three days after the audience in the solar, Elspeth made the mistake of wanting air.

It was a small want, as wants went. The ladies' chambers had been close all morning — Sylva's perfume, which ran to roses and strategic excess, had combined with the tallow smoke from four burning lamps into something that pressed at the back of Elspeth's throat like a hand — and when Lady Meredith dismissed them for an hour before the afternoon's embroidery, Elspeth turned without particular intention toward the outer passage and kept walking until stone gave way to a narrow stair and the stair gave way to the garden.

The Tower of the Hand's garden was not a garden so much as a garden's apology: a rectangle of flagged stone with two raised beds of late-season herbs browning at the edges, a single yew cut into a shape that had perhaps once been a bird, and a bench along the eastern wall where the sun reached for approximately an hour in midmorning and never again. It was not beautiful. It was, however, empty, which counted for considerably more than beauty in the Red Keep.