Ash still clung to the packet when they laid it open in the great hall.
The smell came out first, dry and bitter from the fold of the paper and the cloth that had wrapped it at Ash Run. Then the lists themselves, smaller than the ledgers from Bell Hollow, meaner than the copied boards from the tally room, and somehow more intimate for that reason. South rooms. Night women. Not every hand in the house. Only the ones Rowan still meant to matter if winter failed to give her what she wanted cleanly.
The hall had already learned enough by then that no one mistook a short list for a lesser danger.
