Her father had covered the long table in the north gallery with the sea.
There were charts from every tide station on the western coast, held flat at the corners with whatever had been nearest to hand: a silver inkwell, a dagger, a pair of little jade weights. Over the charts lay sheets of soundings in the cramped hand of naval clerks, and over those, in his own hand, ran lines in red ink. They curved down from the north, bent around the shoulder of the continent, and stopped in a spray of small crosses somewhere off the southern shelf, where the water was deepest.
Anastasia stood where she had stood every morning for a year: at his left shoulder, a pace back, close enough to be seen as his daughter and far enough not to be mistaken for an advisor.
He had not punished her.
