Chapter 24: The Trial of Lord Edwyn Stark

The trial was scheduled for the third hour after dawn, which gave the court sufficient time to dress appropriately and insufficient time to think too carefully about what it was attending.

The hall chosen for the proceeding was not the great throne room — that would have implied a significance that Her Majesty's household wished, on careful reflection, to avoid — but the Amber Chamber, which was large enough to seat the council and its witnesses with room for perhaps forty observers drawn from the court's more senior households. The Amber Chamber had the advantage of formality without spectacle, and of walls that could not carry a voice much beyond its own doors, and it was, as several parties had noted during the preceding week's quiet conversations, the room in which Lord Chelwick's hearing had also been conducted. Whether this was deliberate or coincidental was not a question that anyone at court was currently inclined to raise aloud.

Tyrwick arrived early. This was not his customary practice, and the usher at the door registered faint surprise before recovering himself. Tyrwick had selected a chair at the far end of the hall, against the east wall, where the morning light did not fall directly and where a man with adequate peripheral vision might observe every other face in the room without appearing to observe any particular one. He had brought no wine. He had considered it, and decided against it, not because he would not have welcomed it but because he suspected, with the particular clarity that visited him occasionally in his better moments, that he needed his faculties this morning in a condition he could not entirely guarantee with a glass in his hand.