Act III, Chapter 15: Seravane Moves — Seren Vanishes from Court

The maid's name was Orvyn.

Aldric had not known this when he sat in the darkening room and made his calculations — had not yet assembled the piece, though the piece was there, waiting in the column marked with consistent alarm. He assembled it at dawn, three days after the garden, when he was performing his morning ritual of distracted self-neglect — collar improperly fastened, hair uncombed, the particular vacancy of expression he had learned to inhabit the way one learns to inhabit cold water: by slow degrees, until the body stops registering it as shock.

His steward Perwick brought the water for washing and the news arrived with it, the way bad news usually arrives: wrapped in something ordinary.