Chapter 4: First Sight of the Gilded Court

The Capitol arrived before the Capitol arrived.

Honoria had been awake for an hour already — had, in truth, slept in three separate intervals of approximately ninety minutes each, which she considered an adequate result given the circumstances — when the quality of the dark outside the carriage window began to change. Not lighter, precisely. More inhabited. The darkness between the train and the horizon acquired texture: the angular suggestion of structures, the occasional flicker of a lamp standard passing at speed, and then, without ceremony, a glow that was neither dawn nor fire but something engineered to resemble both, spreading across the low clouds from a source still twenty minutes distant.

She sat up and looked at it through the glass.