Chapter 16: Honoria Reads the Grand Ascension Charter and Finds the Margin Note

The morning after the Masked Cotillion, Honoria woke before her alarm and lay in the dark for precisely four minutes, which was the interval she had determined — on the Capitol train, approximately three weeks and a lifetime ago — to be the maximum permissible duration of lying still and thinking about things one cannot yet act upon.

At minute five, she got up.

Lady Morrow's 7am session was not until Wednesday, which was two days away, and the Court's official schedule for the morning contained a watercolour demonstration in the east conservatory that she had no intention of attending. The Masked Cotillion's official results would be announced at noon. She had approximately five hours, and she intended to use them in the library — not for the etiquette tribunal precedents she had been consulting with increasing frequency, but for something rather more fundamental.