Act II, Chapter 9: Seravane's Architecture of Buried Truth

The candle on Seravane's writing table had burned to its final quarter-inch before she permitted herself to stop.

This was her discipline, and had been for thirty years: she did not stop when she wished to stop. She stopped when the work was finished, or when the candle made the decision for her, and on the nights when the candle was more merciful than she deserved, she sat in the dark for a while and let herself think the thoughts that daylight was too public to permit.

Tonight the work had been correspondence. Twelve letters composed, eight of them meaningless — the social architecture of a court that ran on performed affection and calculated gratitude — and four of them the actual machinery of governance, written in language that could survive any reader's eyes without betraying anything but competence. She had been Queen Consort for twenty-seven years. Her correspondence had been opened and resealed with varying degrees of skill for all of them. She wrote accordingly, always, without exception, even in the letters she burned.