Chapter 2: Petra's Garden and the Last Goodbye

The official documentation required forty minutes.

There were forms, as it turned out — several of them, printed on ivory card stock with the Gilded Court's seal embossed at the upper left corner, which Honoria supposed she ought to have anticipated. A civilisation that had constructed an annual spectacle of social elimination would naturally have developed the appropriate paperwork. She signed where indicated, in a hand she kept deliberately even, while the Court's junior functionary — a young man of approximately twenty-two with the particular look of someone who had grown up believing that a pressed collar was a moral achievement — explained the relevant protocols with the careful enunciation of a person reading from a document he did not entirely understand.

Callum Ashby stood beside her at the processing table, signing his own forms with the unhurried patience of a man who had spent a significant portion of his life waiting for bread to rise. He did not appear distressed. He appeared, if anything, mildly interested in the mechanics of the ink stamp the functionary was preparing, in the way that one of his younger siblings might have been.