Chapter 14: The Secret in the Genealogy

The book Tyrion had lent her was a history of the free cities — dry, thorough, and precisely the kind of reading that kept her mind occupied without requiring her to feel anything — and she had finished it three days ago.

She had kept it anyway. She was not yet certain why. Or rather, she was certain, and had chosen not to examine the certainty too closely, the way one chose not to press a bruise.

The hour was late. The Red Keep at midnight had its own particular grammar: the low creak of cooling stone, the sound of boots at measured intervals where the night watch made its rounds, the distant, intermittent clank of iron that had no identifiable source and which she had stopped trying to identify. Mira was long since asleep in the small anteroom. Elspeth moved through the corridor with a candle in one hand and Tyrion's book in the other, dressed in her warmest robe and the soft indoor shoes that made no sound on the flagstones, and told herself she was returning the book because she was a responsible borrower and not because there had been something in his library that she wanted to look at again.