The rough wool tunic came off slowly.
I stood in the center of our private chambers and peeled it away from my skin with the deliberate care of a man disarming a weapon. Every inch of that coarse, grey fabric had been a performance today, the scratch of it against my collarbone, the way it pooled at my feet like shed humiliation, and now I let it stay on the floor where it fell. I did not kick it aside. I did not look at it again. I simply stepped over it and walked to the window.
The estate spread out below in the fading grey light of dusk, its ordered hedgerows and torchlit pathways looking deceptively peaceful. Deceptively normal. As though nothing of consequence had happened in the Great Hall this morning. As though the Dowager had not sat in her chair at the head of that table with the satisfied stillness of a woman who had already written the ending of a story she believed was hers to finish.
