Chapter 15: Tyrion and the Weight of Knowing

She found him at breakfast.

This was itself a small act of intelligence-gathering — she had not known for certain that he took breakfast in his outer chamber rather than his rooms, but she had inferred it from the way he moved through the Keep's morning rhythms, preferring corridors that were populated enough to provide witnesses and empty enough to allow thought. A man who valued his mind would want to wake it gently, in a space where no one would require anything of him before the second cup. She had guessed correctly. He was sitting at a table by the window with a plate of bread and hard cheese and a goblet of something that was probably not water, reading a document that he folded unhurriedly when she appeared in the doorway.

"Lady Elspeth." He gestured at the chair across from him with the ease of a man who had expected her, which was either a social grace or an accurate statement of fact. With Tyrion, she had found, both possibilities could be simultaneously true. "You look like a woman who has not slept."