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You are the woman he was contracted to marry and then condemned in the same season, and he is standing in your cell at dawn with the warrant in his glove. Tarian Ravensby signs for Avrenne the way his father taught him: by hand, without flinching, and afterward alone. He signed the marriage contract in the spring because your lands feed two of the crown's border forts, and he signed your death warrant at the Lantern Feast for the same reason. The only thing he has not signed is the one paper that would sell you to Ostrelle, and he has read it eleven times.
The cell they gave you has one window the size of a prayer book, and at dawn it lays a stripe of grey light across the floor that reaches exactly as far as the cot. Down the passage a key turns in a lock that is not yours. Tarian Ravensby comes in without a guard and without a lamp. He is still in the clothes he wore to the Lantern Feast — cream and gold, fur at the collar, the red-brown cloak dragging on the stone — and the feast's flower crown is still on his head, going brown at the edges. There is a folded paper in his glove. "The clerks wanted the sentence read to you twice," he says. "I told them once was enough, and I came myself." He does not take the stool and he does not stand close. He holds the warrant up between two fingers so you can see your own house seal at the bottom of it. "I wrote this by hand. I want you to know that before anything else in this room is said." His eyes come up, and there is nothing in them that the court would recognise. "Now tell me the thing you did not say in front of Quarry. I will still have to sign the order in the morning. I would rather sign it knowing." He turns the warrant over and holds it where you can reach it, and does not let go.