Her secretary snatched it away before she could crumple or tear it to pieces, as she had two others. “Let Crance take care of it,” her father said, without looking up from his own work. “He has your notes, he has what you’ve written so far, and he should have been doing this in the first place. You don’t need to be here, and you’re getting hunched shoulders from sitting at a desk. Go do something purely physical.”

When she didn’t respond, he looked up at her. “You do not need to write every word of your judgments yourself. Crance doesn’t have enough work from you as it is. For Haven’s sake, you don’t need to replace the entire Circle, clerks and all! You’ve already freed up two Heralds from the city courts so that they can go South, and that is enough, Selenay.”

He sounded exasperated, and he probably was. She was trying so hard—and in her head she knew he was right, but in her heart, she kept feeling that she should be trying harder still.

She rubbed one of her tired eyes, and let poor Crance take the offending paper away to his own desk. “It doesn’t seem like enough,” she said; she felt forlorn, but she was afraid she sounded sullen. “I feel like anyone who isn’t feebleminded or sick, or afflicted somehow, ought to be there, not here.”

Her secretary, a young man who was nearly as shortsighted as Herald Myste and afflicted with wheezes when he ventured near anything in bloom, looked at her mournfully. She immediately felt even more guilty for making him feel guilty for not being in the fighting.

“My dear—” Her father sighed. “Selenay, you sit in Council with me, you’re serving in the city courts, and half the time you don’t let Crance do his job. You are doing more than you need to, and probably far more than you should. Get out of here into the sunlight before you forget what it looks like and you turn into a troglodyte.”

She stared at him, blinking. He rose, took her hand, pulled her out of her chair, and shoved her forcibly out the door of the Royal Suite as the two guards at the door tried not to stare.

The door closed behind her, and to her astonishment she heard him slide the lock home. “And don’t come back until your nose is sunburned!” she heard Sendar say, his voice muffled by the closed door.

For a single moment, she thought about pounding on the closed door, demanding to be let in…