Chapter 2
She stood quietly where she had been left, just at the side of the door, so she could regard the whole pageant before her unobserved, to stop her legs from shaking. As her eyes adjusted, she realized what jarred in the scene before her.
The trestle tables were covered in coloured cloth; one blue, one orange and one red. The blue table was the longest, almost the whole length of the great room, the orange shorter, and the red table smallest still. Catrin guessed this was reserved for the most select of the revellers.
The guests were also co-ordinated in the same way, all uniformly arrayed in the colour their table dictated and all masked. For so many people, the hall was strangely quiet, as the guests barely spoke and then only in murmurs. There was a strange hush and an undercurrent of febrile excitement.