The candles in the great hall were the expensive kind.
Not the tallow stubs of common households — the tall, ivory columns of rendered beeswax that burned clean and steady and smelled faintly of honey, arranged in tiered candelabras that threw warm gold across the vaulted ceiling and the guests assembled beneath it.
Forty of them, perhaps more, in the finest attire the western provinces could produce — the men in pressed doublets with their house crests embroidered at the breast, the women in the architectural engineering of formal gowns, the corsets pulling waists into the approved silhouette, the skirts belling outward in the fashionable sweep that required three feet of clearance on either side.
A banquet hall that said: 'someone has recently come into significant money.'
