Chapter 6: The First Dinner — Seventeen Forks and a Declaration of War

The first fork was, predictably, the wrong one.

Not wrong in the sense that Honoria had selected it in ignorance — she had spent the better part of the rest period in the library reading Corston's Complete Guide to Capitol Formal Service with the focused attention of a general studying enemy topography — but wrong in the sense that the dinner's second course arrived as a dressed bisque when the programme had indicated a fish preparation, which threw the calculation of the outer implements entirely out of sequence. She set the fork down in a way that conveyed neither indecision nor revision. There was a method to this sort of thing, her father had always said: when the primary system of organisation fails, fall back to observation. Look at what the room knows.

The room knew a great deal. Twenty-four tributes arranged around an oval table so large that the fruit pyramid at its centre appeared to be a geographical feature in its own right, every place setting containing a bristling architecture of silver that constituted, as best Honoria could enumerate from her peripheral vision while preserving the appearance of examining her water glass, seventeen separate implements. Seventeen. She had counted twice and arrived at the same conclusion both times, which was either correct or evidence that the Gilded Court considered even arithmetic to be a matter of opulent excess. The crystal caught the candlelight — the table was lit entirely by candle, a choice that served the dual purpose of romance and of making it extremely difficult to see what anyone else was eating — and threw small refractions against the painted ceiling, where a pastoral scene of idealised plenty unrolled in soft blues and golds above a table from which twenty-three of its seated subjects would not return home.