Chapter 6: Edwyn Discovers the Books

Three weeks into his appointment as King's First Counsellor, Lord Edwyn Stark rose before the servants had troubled themselves about it, dressed without assistance in the manner of a man who had never found the process sufficiently complicated to require an audience, and made his way through the stone corridors of Redkeep to the office that had been assigned to him with the careful courtesy of a household that had assigned it to three previous occupants and was, on some institutional level, accustomed to its eventual vacancy.

The office was a fine room. Edwyn had decided this on the first morning and had not revised his opinion, which was the sort of consistency that his wife considered a virtue and the court considered a symptom. It had tall windows looking south over the city, a fireplace that drew properly, and shelves that ran from floor to ceiling along two walls, populated by the accumulated documentation of a kingdom's financial life — ledger upon ledger, bound and dated and labelled in the precise hand of whoever had held this position before him, and the position before that, stretching back in an unbroken clerical lineage that Edwyn found, in its orderly accumulation, genuinely satisfying to contemplate.

He lit his own fire and set his own kettle and opened the first ledger of the morning, which was the household accounts for the seventh year of the late king's reign, and which was, in every particular, entirely unremarkable. He made notes. He cross-referenced. He drank his tea.