I had to override that voice with pure discipline, with my trust in Fitzroy and in the months of careful work behind this moment, and sign my name in a steady hand while my instincts howled.

It was, in its way, the mirror image of what the Pembrooks had done to Yvaine’s family — a signature given at a wedding, in apparent trust, that would determine everything.

Except that theirs had been a genuine trap laid for an innocent, and mine was a trap disguised as a trap’s victim, a signature that looked like surrender and was actually the closing of a jaw.

Percival watched me sign and saw a woman handing him her life’s work.

What I was actually doing was handing him, in the form of his family’s own sworn representations, the legal instrument of their destruction.

But my hand did not know the difference as it moved, and it took everything I had to keep it steady.