“Isn’t that what grandmothers do? Avoid all the work then whisk in for the glory? It’s safe, now, isn’t it?”

“Of course, but—”

“It wasn’t safe before.”

“I am aware. I was thinking very much the same thing while I sat in the midst of at least two different riots, then in prison, then in the dock.”

“Your father and I sitting there with you would only have made things worse.” Harod gave an annoyed burble, and Savine’s mother softened her

exasperated tone. “I wanted to be there, to help you through it all. When the babies were born, of course I wanted nothing more. But I knew all I could do was to put you in more danger. And I knew you’d make it through. You’ve always been such a fighter. Such a modern, can-do woman. You really are so like your father. The pair of you simply refuse to be beaten.”

“He isn’t my father,” grumbled Savine, but it sounded churlish. How the hell could she have come out of this as the unreasonable one?

“Whether you like it or not, he’s your father in every way that counts.”

“Then where was he?”

“It’s better… that he explains it himself.”

“He’s here?”

“I think he wanted me to talk to you first. Break the ice. You know how it is, Savine, married couples tend to specialise, and I’ve always done the small talk, while he was more interested in—”

“The torture?”

“I was going to say the long-term planning, but no doubt you’ll have it your way. You always have.”

Savine pronounced every word with angry precision. “Believe me when I say that I have not. Where is he?”

Her mother nodded towards an unused door. “Can I stay with them? For a while?”

Savine wanted to say no. But she had never known how to say no to her mother. And Harod was clinging to her finger so tightly, the bloody little traitor. It would only have been punishing the children, and everything was supposed to be about them, now. Having a child limits one’s choices. Two at once is an even worse constriction. Make one of them a king and you lose all say in anything.

Savine gave a hopeless shrug. “Since you’re here.”

She turned the key in the door and stepped through.

She had never found out why they called it the Sighing Room. Perhaps some royal widow had worn her life away in endless mourning there. It had three doors, one to the nursery, one to their great chamber and one out into the hallway. The walls had been scrubbed clean of the Breakers’ slogans and freshly whitewashed, but Savine had not got as far as decorating. In any reasonable house it would have been a grand salon. In the palace it was one step above a cupboard. But it had a fine, high vaulted ceiling, and a stone floor polished by the passage of centuries of servants’ feet, and a beautiful window. There was excellent light in the mornings, so Leo had requisitioned the place for Carmee Groom to paint his portrait. In the evenings, though, it was quiet, and dim, and full of shadows.