Chapter 14 · free to read
The least important room in the palace. Nobody has ever listened at the door of a room where the irons are kept.
The bird with long legs. It is stitched in silver on the breast of every senior officer of the Grand Secretariat, and I had bowed to it a hundred times a day for two years without ever once looking at it.
I had been fighting a woman who kills people. It had taken me until that doorway to understand that I was standing in the offices of the thing that outlives her.
Dawn. The whole court, the claim decided in a single sitting, the summons drawn up and sealed by the man whose bird was on the poison slip. He had stopped waiting. Which meant he had counted the room and liked the number.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.