It is about permission.

Four hundred people had spent their whole lives learning to read the powerful person in any room and take their cues from her, and Seraphina was the most powerful person present, and she had laughed, and so they laughed.

If I had run, if I had wept, they would have remembered me as the woman who fell apart, and they would have felt, dimly, that I had deserved it.

So I did not run and I did not weep.

I stood with the silk fallen away from my ribs and I let them laugh, and I kept my face still and my breathing slow, and I waited — because I knew something about the physics of a room like that which Seraphina, for all her cleverness, had never learned.

Permission runs in both directions.