The skull arrived at breakfast.
It was human — or had been, once, before someone polished it to a high shine and filled the eye sockets with rubies and wrapped it in black velvet and tied it with a ribbon the colour of arterial blood and placed it on a silver tray beside a card that read, in handwriting so elaborate it bordered on the obscene: For my beloved Cordelia, a token of the darkness we shall share. — His Royal Highness, Prince Sorath of the Crimson Court.
Cordelia Virellion stared at it across the breakfast table with the particular expression of a woman who had just been handed a dead person's head as a love letter and was expected to be grateful.
"It is looking at me," she said.
