Chapter 19: A Lesson from Sansa

The news arrived the way bad news always arrived in the Red Keep: through a servant, at an inconvenient hour, wearing the costume of something smaller than it was.

It was a junior steward who brought it, a boy of perhaps seventeen with the raw-boned look of recent growth, who appeared in the doorway of the ladies' antechamber with his cap already twisted in both hands and his eyes cutting to Lady Meredith as though she were the only person in the room authorized to receive catastrophe. He said, in the flattened tone of a man delivering words he had rehearsed so thoroughly they had ceased to hold meaning: that His Grace the King had been wounded in the hunting, that the wound had gone foul, that the maester was in attendance.

That the prognosis was uncertain.