Chapter 4: Tyrion's Curiosity

The supper was not the kind that anyone would remember.

That was, Elspeth had come to understand, the particular function of minor court suppers: to occur. To fill the evening hours with the performance of civility so that the city did not have to acknowledge what it was actually doing in the dark. Some forty people, perhaps, arranged across three tables in one of the lesser halls — a room that smelled of tallow and old rushes and the particular sweetness of wine beginning, faintly, to turn. The windows were high and narrow. The candles were adequate. No one had troubled to bring fresh herbs.

She had been placed, by the logic of precedence that governed these arrangements, near the lower end of the middle table, between Lady Alys Ashford and a young knight from the Reach whose name she had not retained because he had spent the first quarter-hour of supper explaining, with great confidence, his theory of horse breeding. She had nodded at intervals. She had drunk her wine slowly. She had observed, through the practiced screen of polite inattention she was assembling piece by piece like a thing that would eventually keep the rain out, everything that was happening at the upper table.