Chapter 24: The Presentation Ball — Seraphine's Finest Hour and Honoria's Worst Trick

The morning of the Presentation Ball arrived with the particular cruelty of beautiful weather.

Honoria had watched it come from the window of her tributary room — the Capitol's sky performing its most accomplished shade of rose gold, the kind of dawn that would have been, in Province Twelve, a sign that the fog was about to thicken considerably. Here, it was simply decorative. The Capitol did not require its weather to mean anything.

She had read the third particular four times since Aldric had delivered it, and by the fifth reading she had stopped reading it and begun instead to see the whole mechanism the way her father had taught her to see a theorem — not as a series of individual steps but as a structure, its weight distributed across every point at once. The third particular was a procedural note regarding the order of formal presentation at the Ball: specifically, the requirement that tributes entering the final sequence must be presented by their sponsor, in order of current standing, before the assembled Court and its full broadcast capacity. Seraphine first. Herself second. Callum third.