Simply because the room had a quality in the evenings that other rooms in the palace did not have, a quality that was difficult to name precisely but that people navigated toward the way plants navigated toward light.
Tonight: Elara, Samuel, Fen, Demerti, Mahir, Ken — who was present in the specific way of someone who had made the food and was now managing the complicated experience of watching other people eat it — Jesper, who had arrived with the careful casualness of someone who had always been planning to be here, and two of the newer guard staff who had been invited by nobody specifically and had appeared in the doorway at the right moment and been waved in by Samuel, who had developed a policy of waving people in that Elara had not instituted and did not intend to stop.
The fish was extraordinary.
