Chapter 7: Sansa's Architecture of Belief

The assignment came through Lady Meredith, delivered in the flat tone of someone distributing laundry duties: Lady Elspeth would attend Lady Sansa Stark for a morning constitutional along the Blackwater shore. Two hours. A guard escort had been arranged. The Queen's household maintained cordial relations with the Hand's.

Elspeth received this information with a nod and spent the walk to the Tower of the Hand constructing the precise texture of polite distance she intended to maintain for two hours. Sympathetic enough not to give offence. Forgettable enough not to be remembered. She had, after all, just been reminded at considerable personal cost that memorable was a liability.

The morning was grey and cold in the particular way of King's Landing in autumn, which was to say that it was less cold than it looked and smelled significantly worse. The Blackwater Rush ran dark below the city's southern wall, slow and wide, its surface catching the overcast sky and returning it flattened, colourless. Gulls worked the shallows near the dockyards. The smell of brine mixed with something older and less pleasant — tallow from the chandlers, refuse from the streets that ran down to the bank, the particular staleness of water that moved without truly going anywhere.