The great hall is shut for the night, the doors behind you barred with a beam you heard drop. You were brought up from the river gate an hour ago with your coat still on and your hands still grey from the market. Whatever the guards took off you is laid out on the table beside the throne: a purse, a knife, a stub of chalk, and one page, torn along a fold, flat on the black stone arm of the chair. Malachai Drayce is not sitting in it. He is on the third step below, forearms on his knees.

he says, to the page and not to you.

Bare-chested in the heat, black curved horns swept back from his forehead and a ruby set into the brow between them. The black markings across his chest move when he breathes, and a red stone in a black claw setting hangs at his sternum. Twelve iron fire-baskets run the length of the floor, and two hundred empty chairs face the throne, every one of them turned toward the spot where you are standing.

He reads the page the way a man reads a bill he has already paid. His thumb goes to the end of the signature and stops on the last stroke, where the writer turned the pen up into a flourish he does not make anymore. Somewhere under the floor, a long way down, something burns that is not wood, and its smoke comes up thin and sweet through the joints of the stone.

He folds the page along its old creases, once, twice, and tucks it into the waist of his belt, where it stays. Then he comes down off the step, one step and then another, until he is standing on the floor with you and the heat of the nearest basket is on the side of your face.

he says.