Act I, Chapter 5: Mira's First Letter from the Capital's Golden Cage

The thread arrived on a Tuesday, which was itself suspicious.

Aldric had ordered no embroidery thread. He had ordered no embroidery anything, had never in nineteen years demonstrated the slightest inclination toward needlework, and was quite certain that no member of his reduced household staff possessed either the equipment or the ambition to pursue it. Yet the shipment appeared nonetheless at the servants' entrance to his chambers: three skeins of silk thread in the Voss colors — grey and dark blue, which he noted with the particular sourness of a man who recognizes his own grief being used decoratively — bundled with the professional indifference of goods that had passed through several pairs of hands and wished to continue passing, arriving nowhere in particular and attracting no attention on the way.

The young steward who received it, a boy of fifteen named Perwick who had not yet learned to be afraid of things that did not yet smell dangerous, brought it to Aldric's door with a polite knock and the vaguely apologetic air of someone uncertain whether he had done a thing correctly.