Act II, Chapter 12: The Fool Who Speaks the Only Truth Worth Hearing

The corridor behind the eastern gallery ran twelve paces from the door of the lesser council chamber to the servants' stair, and Aldric had learned to count those paces in the dark, which was the only state in which he willingly used this passage. No torches. The sconces here had not been lit in living memory, the tallow left to the rats, the iron left to the rust. It was the architectural equivalent of a held breath — a space the castle had agreed, by collective neglect, to forget.

He was three paces from the servants' stair when the bells rang.

Not the chapel bells, not the watch bells. Smaller. Personal. The particular silver note of a fool's collar — three bells, slightly different in pitch, producing a chord that was almost musical and entirely deliberate.