Chapter 9: Tyrion Teaches the First Rule of Court Survival

The fire had burned low by the time Mira finished.

Elizabeth sat with it for a moment — the whole of what she had been given, laid out across the morning like a map of something unpleasant. Vane's correspondence arrived through no single channel. Sometimes Tuesday, sometimes not. Sometimes the seal was personal, sometimes institutional, sometimes neither, the letters themselves bound with nothing but a plain cord that the Red Keep's standard distribution carriers apparently did not consider remarkable enough to note. He received them in the dining chamber, in the Council anteroom, twice in the stable yard in weather no one of his station had reason to be standing in. He never took them to his private office. This was what Mira meant about the parts she would not like.

He took them, invariably, elsewhere.