Chapter 17: Joanna Learns What Renly Is

The sitting room that Joanna had arranged to her satisfaction in the first fortnight — a vase of late chrysanthemums, two chairs positioned toward the window, a writing table cleared of everything but her correspondence box and a small portrait of Catelyn that she had brought from Wintermere and considered essential — looked, in the early evening light, precisely as it always did. This was the difficulty. Things that were about to change irrevocably had a particular talent for looking, in their final moments, exactly like themselves.

Aria stood in the doorway for three seconds longer than strictly necessary.

She had rehearsed this conversation four times since leaving Tyrwick's library. The first rehearsal had been in the corridor immediately following, conducted internally and at considerable pace. The second had been in her own room that night, lying on her back on the stone floor because the bed had seemed too comfortable for the purpose. The third had been this morning, in the training yard, where she had driven Ser Aldric's practice blade away with enough force that he had told her, with professional understatement, that aggression and technique were not, in his considerable experience, the same thing. The fourth had been on the stairs just now.