Chapter 20: The Arrest of Lord Starkton

The corridor outside the Small Council chamber was uncommonly well-lit for a place conducting the business of ruin, and the Watch commander — a man of middling height and the carefully neutral expression of someone paid specifically to have no opinions about his assignments — maintained a distance of precisely three feet behind Lord Eddard that was neither custody nor companionship but occupied, with considerable professional skill, the unpleasant space between them.

They walked east.

The palace in the morning hours conducted itself with the particular industriousness of a household that knows its master is dead and has already begun the work of adjustment. Servants moved along the side corridors with the brisk purposefulness of people who have received revised instructions and prefer not to be observed receiving them. A footman carrying a tray of correspondence turned at the sound of the Watch's boots and then turned back with a decision that lived entirely in the half-second hesitation before it. A housemaid pressing herself to the wall as the party passed kept her eyes very firmly on the plaster, which was perhaps the most sophisticated political act performed in Whitehall Palace that morning.