Chapter 15: The Masked Cotillion and Three Conversations That Happen in the Dark

The card contained a seating plan.

Not for the Jade Salon — that had already happened, its social mathematics already computed and filed. This was for the Masked Cotillion, which was not scheduled until the following Thursday, and which, according to the Grand Ascension's official procedural documentation, assigned positions by lottery on the morning of the event itself to prevent precisely this kind of advance preparation. The card was written in a hand Honoria did not recognise. It bore no signature. The floral arrangement that had concealed it was a particularly aggressive arrangement of white camellias, which the Court used, she had learned from Lady Morrow's third strategy session, for occasions of formal ceremonial significance.

She stood in the empty Jade Salon for four minutes, holding the card in the candlelight that the evening staff had left burning, reading it twice and then once more to confirm that her first reading had been accurate. Then she replaced it with the care of someone returning a borrowed item and walked back through the service entrance, and up the eastern corridor to her quarters, and sat on the edge of her narrow bed with her hands folded in her lap and thought about what it meant that someone had gone to the considerable trouble of constructing a seating plan for an event determined by lottery.