"You let her out."
"In the end." Halloran's jaw worked. "The court took a decision in my forty-eighth year — a quiet one, the older provision, the last nine to be concluded on the grounds that the world had moved on and there was no longer any sense in the expense. They voted on a Tuesday. It took nine minutes." He looked into the fire. "And on the Thursday I sent a woman I trusted into the west house with a cart, and had the rings cut, and I did not go myself, because a king who is seen doing it cannot go on being a king, and I told myself that mattered.