The Black Swan Read Online Free PDF Page B

affair had concluded, she had welcomed him again into her bed, secretly of course, and he had been as satisfactory there as elsewhere.
    She roused herself from her reverie; there were things to be done. With great care for the drape of her gown, she rose from her chair and entered the outer chamber. With a gesture, she summoned her ladies from their own handiwork, gathered them around her and left her chambers, descending from the Royal Tower by the worn stone staircase to the Great Hall.
    As she entered, the assembled courtiers bowed and curtsied, and she paused on the threshold, hand cupped once again over her ring.
    The Great Hall’s lofty ceiling, lost in the shadows, boasted no captured battle banners hanging from the crossbeams. That was an innovation on Clothilde’s part; displayed bravely above the heads of her courtiers were banners portraying the arms of everyone of any note in the Court. The most important hung closest to the throne, of course, but everyone who boasted a title and arms, even if it was no higher than esquire, could look up and see his arms on display there.
    It flattered everyone without obviously being flattery, and everyone who looked up remembered that it was Clothilde who had put their arms in the Great Hall, replacing the trophies of past kings.
    The battle flags now decked the formerly bare walls of the garrison hall. This also flattered Clothilde’s soldiers, because she had told them that the battle flags should be in the custody of those who were truly responsible for capturing them in the first place.
    Whitewashed plaster coated the stone walls of the Great Hall, keeping out drafts and insulating the room from the damp that came with walls of stone. False columns painted on the plaster, with false walls and statuary painted between, made the room look larger than it was, and a gallery painted above the columns held the likenesses of the knights and ladies of Arthur’s fabled Round Table looking down on the courtiers of Clothilde’s court. In her husband’s time, there had been no gallery above the painted columns, and the columns themselves barely stood out against the cracked plaster, stained with decades of smoke and soot.
    Like the Great Hall, Clothilde’s male courtiers had changed since her husband’s time; no longer did they appear in garments worn, shabby, or stained. Even the oldest and most recalcitrant had been coerced into well-made, clean court-garb by wives, sisters, and mothers.
    Perhaps they did not care before because the Hall was too dark for anyone to see what disgraceful state their men appeared in. A good proportion of men, as she well knew, did not care what they wore, nor how stained and disreputable it was, so long as they did not freeze or bake.
    She paced gravely up the middle of the Great Hall, as her courtiers moved respectfully aside for her. Reaching the dais, she took the three steps in the same grave manner, then turned, bowed her head in acknowledgment, and took her seat on the throne.
    Her herald stepped up to the front of the dais, knocked his staff three times on the floor to signify that court was in session, and the first of the day’s audience seekers presented himself as his name was called.
    Clothilde clasped her hands together in her lap and sat with the perfect stillness of one of the painted figures above, listening with an expression containing equal parts of gravity, attention, and concern.
    Siegfried was nowhere to be seen, of course. Court bored him, for Clothilde had seen to it that he only knew the most tedious aspects.
    As she sent one petitioner away satisfied, and prepared to welcome a wealthy trader, she considered her court, her court, the court that she had made out of the dribs and drabs her husband had ruled. Her resolve hardened.
    She would never tamely hand what was hers by right over to her fool of a son. Never.
    Her hand covered that emblem of her power, her signet ring, and it warmed until it