Chapter 24: Petra Calloway Chooses Her Name

The summons arrived on a Saturday, which Petra considered impeccable timing on the part of whoever arranged these things, since Saturday was the day she had set aside to feel, in a controlled and systematic fashion, all the things she had been deferring since the gamekeeper's cottage. She had not yet begun this project. She suspected now that she would not.

The document was written on paper that was not quite paper—it had the particular quality of vellum that had been vellum for considerably longer than any mortal sheep could account for—and was sealed in the deep, salt-green wax she was beginning to associate with official Poseidonic correspondence, which was itself an association she was still in the process of accepting as a feature of her life rather than an aberration in it.

Miss Petra Calloway, daughter of Eleanor Calloway of Devonshire, acknowledged lineage of the Poseidonic first generation, was formally invited to present herself before the assembled divine tributary court at two o'clock on Saturday afternoon, at the address in St. James's that mortal cartographers had continued, for three hundred years, to decline to map.