Chapter 12: The Tourney and Its Violences

The morning of the tourney arrived with a sky the color of old pewter, and Elspeth laced herself into her best dress — the dark grey with the silver-thread hem, modest enough to escape comment, fine enough not to invite pity — and told herself, with the conviction of a woman who has learned to believe her own fictions, that it was merely another occasion for observation.

She did not believe it.

She had attended enough events in this court to know that each one was a room within a room, the visible performance arranged over the invisible one like silk over stone. A tourney was simply a larger theatre with the same cast and a higher probability of blood.