His room was in the old east wing, two floors below the tower where Josephina had once been lodged. It was a clerk's chamber in all but name: a narrow bed, a writing table, a single window that looked down across the inner court to the great hall's side doors. He had been sent there after the solar, with the duke's last look still sitting in his spine. *You will sit at the lower table. You will not mention your mother.*
He did not go down.
The feast assembled without him. He heard it first as sound: the grind of the hall doors, the rise of voices trained to courtesy, the scrape of benches, the first sharp laugh that always belonged to someone who needed to prove he was not afraid of imperial eyes. Servants moved in lines across the court like a second, quieter army. Platters. Wine. The good silver that left the vaults only when the Empire came to count the house's teeth.
