Since I was running the family now, I could have just taken any room I fancied. I could have thrown the Matriarch out of her special suite, and no one would have stopped me. But I didn’t have the heart. It would have been cruel . . . to Alistair. You big softy, Molly said later, when I told her, but she was only partly right. Even then, I knew I didn’t want to make an enemy of Martha Drood because I might need her help . . .

In the end, I just chose one of the better situated rooms in the west wing and booted out the poor beggar who was living there. He in turn picked someone lower down on the food chain and evicted them, and moved into their room. And so it went, for several days, until you couldn’t move in the corridors for people hauling their belongings from one room to another. Presumably the poor bastard at the bottom of the pile ended up moving back into the communal dormitory with the children.

(There are no guest rooms in the Hall. Only family gets to live in the Hall.)

Even so, Molly wasn’t especially impressed when she saw where she’d be staying with me. She just couldn’t get her head around the fact that members of the most powerful family in the world only got one room to live in. But that’s what happens when a family’s numbers expand faster than we can build on new wings. Another generation or two and we’ll have to find or build a new home, but no one was ready to talk about that yet.

I let us into our room, and Molly immediately ran over to the bed and threw herself onto it. She sank half out of sight into the deep goose-feather mattress and sighed blissfully.

“Still don’t care much for the room, but I do love this bed. I feel like I could sink all the way down to China.”

“What’s wrong with the room?” I said patiently.

“Far too much like a hotel room,” Molly said firmly. “All very luxurious, I’m sure, but it has no character. It’s . . . cold, impersonal.”

I smiled at her. “When did you ever stay in hotels, oh wicked witch of the woods?”

She wriggled cosily on the bed. “Oh, I get around. You’d be surprised, some of the places I’ve been. And it’s not like I can take my forest everywhere with me . . . Still, I’ll say this for hotels . . . I love room service. You just pick up the phone and they bring you food, every hour of the day and night. I always pig out at hotels. Particularly because I never stick around to pay the bills . . .”