Act I, Chapter 4: The Mask Aldric Builds from His Father's Shattered Honor

The first performance was an accident.

He had not planned it. He had not, in the four days since Rowan's courier departed with a horse and warm food and the cautious courtesy extended to bearers of difficult news, planned much beyond the immediate mathematics of survival — which letters to write, which to burn, which to carry in cipher within a false-bottomed drawer and address to a sister looking out at an execution yard. He had planned the quality of silence he would maintain in Lord Chamberlain Hess's great hall. He had planned the specific arrangement of his face: sorrowful bewilderment, still serviceable, perhaps requiring some refinement, perhaps something slightly more unhinged at the edges to account for Rowan's declaration and what a young man of ordinary feeling would be expected to display in its aftermath.

What he had not planned was Lord Aldwick's dog.