In Elfindom the succession is determined by the dying ruler naming who is to come after her. If, by some misadventure, the declaration is not made, resort is had to divination. At sunrise half a dozen flying fairies are sent up to net larks—as many larks as there are eligible ladies, with a few over in case of accidents. During the morning the larks, one to each lady, are caged, ringed, and have leaden weights wired to their feet. On the stroke of noon the court officeholders—Chancellor, Astrologer, Keeper of the Records, Chamberlain, and so forth—wearing black hoods and accompanied by pages and cage bearers, go in torchlight procession to the Knowing Room, a stone cellar deep in the castle’s foundations, where there is a well, said to be bottomless. One by one, the larks are taken from the cages, held above the well while the name of their lady is pronounced, and then dropped in. The weights are delicately adjusted to allow the larks a brief struggle before they drown. Its duration is noted with a stopwatch by the Court Horologer and when one by one the larks have drowned, the lark which struggled longest has won the Queenship for the lady it was dedicated to. The officials throw off their mourning hoods and go back to the Throne Room, where they kiss the hand of the new Queen and drink her health from a steaming loving-cup of spiced and honeyed wine which recovers them from the cramping chill of their ordeal57 in the Knowing Room.

At Elfhame, however, all this was hearsay: Tiphaine and the two Queens before her had been named. Lark patties and the loving-cup were all anyone expected.

Early in the new year the weather changed. Rain pock­marked the snow that lay in rigid shrouds over the black moorland; the swans were hidden in a web of low-lying cloud. Suddenly they reappeared; the wind had shifted into the north and there it would stay, said the head gardener who remembered Queen Maharit, through the three long months ahead—the starving months, when shrew mice feasted underground, and deer and cattle wandered slowly in search of food, eating frozen heather, rushes, dead bracken, anything that would stay the craving to munch and swallow.

It was warm in the castle, where the walls of solid earth muffled the noise of the wind. Chess tables were laid out in the gallery: matches lasted for days on end, protracted by skilful evasions, long considerings before the capture of a pawn. From the musicians’ room came intermittent twangings and cockcrowings, flourishes of melody broken off, begun again, broken off again, as the court band of harps and trumpets rehearsed the funeral and coronation marches which would soon be needed. In Tiphaine’s chamber the Head Archivist sat by her bed, waiting to take down her dying command about her successor. Every morning he was brought a new quill pen. Every night he was replaced by the Sub-Archivist, who had a peculiar aversion to monkeys, unfortunate but also convenient, since it kept him reliably awake.