Chapter 18: Tyrion's Confession in the Hour Before Dawn

The knock came at the second hour past midnight, three precise raps that were not loud enough to wake the corridor and were not soft enough to be mistaken for settling stonework.

Elizabeth was already awake.

She had been lying in the dark for the better part of an hour, watching the shadows on the ceiling perform their slow migrations as the dying fire shifted, reconstructing from memory the exact weight of Aldric Crestborne's silence after she had told him everything. Not the silence itself — she had catalogued that thoroughly enough — but what it had contained. The specific texture of a man realizing that the story he thought he was living in had acquired, without his consent, a different shape.