Chapter 12: Renly Barrow's Other Loyalty

The noise came from behind a door that had no business being open.

Aria had been returning from the training yard by the back corridor — the one that smelled of old rushes and recent damp, which the household used for the movement of laundry and which Aria had adopted as her preferred route precisely because no one else of her station was expected to use it. She had learned, in the six weeks since their arrival at Redkeep, that the castle's secondary passages were considerably more educational than its primary ones. In the main corridors, people composed their faces. In the back ones, they forgot to.

The door was to a small room she had noted previously as a steward's office, or perhaps a linen store — she had never seen it open, had catalogued it as unoccupied, and was therefore surprised, as she rounded the corner with her practice sword tucked under her arm and a scrape on her left hand from where she had misjudged a parry, to hear voices from within. Not the voices of servants. The particular quality of silence between the words told her that.