Matthias, who has eaten soup with his hands, is spending his idle thoughts wishing he'd known that the dressing requirement was as important as it seems to be. He would describe Gwenaëlle and Athessa somewhere between elegantly impossible and meringue, but fashionable--and how did Athessa end up looking so good as she does, it's unfair, and he's trying not to look at her--and Iorveth looks bloody good too, well-dressed, like a posh statue of white marble, and Matthias--

Well, he'd once stolen a fine tunic off a corpse on the battlefield, only needed a bit of mending and a wash, then had gotten too frightened of it and buried it behind his tent in the dead of night. So that's where he's starting from. He'd shown up for this well-scrubbed, at least, wearing clean and nearly-fitting clothes (too short at the cuffs, as usual). He's slumped in his chair, the very picture of poor posture, picking at a thread on the gray cote-hardie, which is near enough to a robe to make him feel both secure and insecure.

"I spent half a season eating with pigs once," he says to the table at large, all sullen and Free Marcher, "actual pigs. Not out of the same trough or anything--near enough. I'd go back and do it all over again if it'd get me out of this. What's so amusing about it?"