Chapter 7: Tyrwick's Private Arithmetic

It was a truth that Lord Tyrwick Lanneth had long since accepted about himself: he was, by temperament and by training, a man who counted things.

He counted the candles in a room, because the number of candles indicated the relative importance attached to any given gathering. He counted the steps between a door and the nearest window, because the distance between an entrance and an exit was information of reliable practical value. He counted the seconds between when a man was told an unwelcome thing and when that man's expression shifted, because the interval was, in his experience, a tolerably accurate measure of that man's intelligence. He counted bottles, naturally, though that was less tactical calculation than professional habit.

He had, at the age of thirty-one, counted backwards nine months from the birth of Crown Prince Joffram, in the idle way a man conducts arithmetic when there is nothing more interesting to occupy his mind, and had arrived at a number that he found, upon reflection, considerably more interesting than anything else he had encountered that season. He had verified his figures. He had consulted, with great and deliberate casualness, certain court calendars. He had noted several well-documented occasions on which the late King Arion had been abroad at campaigns, at treaty negotiations, at hunting expeditions of extended duration, in the company of persons who were, without exception, not his queen.