The stores room under the gatehouse smelled of cold grain and of the rendered fat the Hold burned in its lamps. In the lamplight the sacks stood along the wall in grey-brown rows, each one tied at the neck, and Idrin looked along them the way the Mason had taught him to look along a course of stones: from the nearest to the farthest, before he let himself put a number to anything. Harrow had made him stand in the yard in his first week and count a wall he had not built. He had not been grateful then. He was beginning to be.
Tallow stood at the end of the nearest row with a board braced on one hip and a stub of pencil behind his ear. He had been awake since the bell and looked it, and his cuffs were ink-spotted to the elbow.
“How many sacks?” Idrin asked.
“Three hundred and ten,” said Tallow. “Give or take the sacks in the Undercroft which were weighed and never counted. So between three hundred and ten and three hundred and eighteen.”
“One number, Tallow.”
“Three hundred and ten, Warden.” Tallow’s mouth tightened, and Idrin watched him decide to keep the rest of the range to himself. It did not stay there. “The range is in the minutes, if anyone wants to know how sure I am.”
“No one wants to know how sure you are. We want to know whether we eat until the thaw.”
“Then the answer is yes, with the usual range on the thaw.”
Idrin laughed, which surprised them both. The silence of the Silent Winter had got into the Hold like damp into a wall, and a laugh in the stores room sounded like a crack in plaster. Tallow looked pleased with himself and then pretended he had not.
They went along the rows together. The Hold had put its autumn into this room: the barley from the lower fields, the rye that Pell disliked and used anyway, a barrel of salt fish from a Coldharbour boat that had not been sold on the quay, and the cheese the goat-pens had made in the last warm weeks, which Tamsin insisted on calling by the name of each goat. Idrin touched none of it. He had learned that a Warden who touched the sacks would be asked by the sacks what he intended to do with them.
The silver chest stood in the corner under a cloth. Tallow lifted the cloth and tapped the lid twice, and the sound it made was dull and honest. A hundred and twenty marks, marsh-minted, in bars the size of a child’s hand. Bardo Kell had promised the rest on the first thaw, when the ford was passable and the salt barges could come up the Sallow with their holds empty and their tempers sour. The Hold had paid him in stone, and then in iron that was not iron, because the body could not spare much of the real thing, and now the marsh was paying the debt back in silver that could not be eaten.
“Will he come?” Idrin asked.
“He will come,” said Tallow. “He will come on the tide that suits his boats, and he will tell us the tide was late, and he will charge us for the lateness. I have the figure. It is a range.”
“Of course it is.”
Idrin closed the lid himself. He had thought about the iron as they walked. The Hold had almost none spare, and the body ate iron when the weft ran thin, so every bar of iron in the Hold was a question put to the thing that stood in the walls and lay under the Keystone. He had asked the Chamber to keep the iron for the gate, and the Chamber had kept it. He did not yet know what he would do when the gate was finished and the iron was gone.
“The Mason says the gate-bar will be ash and oak with an iron band,” Tallow said, reading his face. “He says the band is the body’s to decide.”
“The Mason has never once asked the body to decide anything.”
“He has asked it about the stones every morning for a year, Warden. The body answers in weight.”
Idrin took a candle from the hook by the door and went out into the court. The snow had stopped in the night and the cold had settled into the stone, and the air had the thin, clean edge that meant the marsh would freeze hard before dawn. Along the north wall the lodgers’ hearths were banked low, and a child was singing somewhere in Lowgate, a flat little tune that had no tune in it at all. Idrin stopped to listen. He knew that the song was not his. He could not have told anyone why he listened for it anyway.
The guest room was at the top of the gatehouse stair, three steps below the room where Harrow kept his cord. Lady Ossane Tiller had been a guest in it since the autumn, by her own word and by the Chamber’s leave, and the leave had never been written out as a Writ. The Writ that had first held her had run out at dawn one morning in the autumn, and the Chamber had simply kept her on by voices and forgotten to say so in the minutes. Ossane had not forgotten. She had pointed it out to Tallow with great courtesy. A Writ, in Lessary, is a signed paper that says what may be done to a person or a thing, and for how long. The Hold had learned that a room could hold a woman as surely as any lock, and that the holding ended only when somebody remembered to end it.
Idrin carried a bowl of Pell’s barley up the stair with a cloth folded over it. The guard at the door, a lodger named Osk who had been a dyer before the snows, stood aside and said nothing, which was how the lodgers said good evening to a Warden they did not trust yet.
Ossane was at the table with a pen in her hand and a book open before her. She looked up, took in the bowl, and smiled as though he had brought her a letter from home.
“Pell’s barley,” she said. “I know the smell. The whole Hold smells of it by the second bell, and I have begun to think that is the only honest thing in the place.” She set the pen down with care. “Thank you. You have brought me something to eat and I have been trying all week to think of something to ask you for. I have come up with a paper. May I have some paper?”
“You may have paper.”
“And I should like to know what the Writ says about my wardrobe.”
“The Chamber’s leave names this room,” Idrin said. “It says nothing about wardrobes.”
“Then I shall have to ask the Chamber whether my grey dress is a fixture.” She ate a spoonful of barley and nodded at the bowl as if it had answered. “You will send up my trunk. I know you will, because you are not the sort of prince who keeps a woman’s trunk in the rain for the sake of a principle. And then you will tell me your name, because I have been calling you Warden, and Your Highness, and once, by mistake, Your Majesty, and I am tired of it.”
He put the bowl down on the sill. There was a slate on the table, and a stub of chalk beside it. He picked the chalk up and wrote, in a plain hand, the name that had been read over him at the font in Lessary, among the seven names of a seventh son. He turned the slate round so that she could read it.
Ossane read it aloud, pleasantly, in her warm and exact voice. Then she looked at his face, and he saw her see what the name cost him to write, which was nothing that showed. He had not been able to say it since the Writ that held her in this room. He could write it. He could spell it, letter by letter, and find the act of spelling was a kind of counting, and that he was good at it.
“You cannot say it,” she said.
“I can write it.”
“Then you have signed a Writ that takes your own name, and you have kept the part you can hold.” She said it without cruelty. She said it the way she would have read out the terms of a bond. “It is a clever bargain. I have seen Lessaran lords make worse ones for their daughters’ dowries, and they did not even have the excuse of a dead city to bargain with.”
“I did not bargain for it. The Chamber voted.”
“Of course it did. Your Chamber votes for everything with the greatest reluctance and then does it anyway.” She tapped the slate with one finger, and the chalk dust came away grey. “Let me offer you something in return, Warden, since you have brought me barley and a name. I can draft you a Charter of your own, one that says what you are for, in words you can read out to the Hands without stopping. A Warden needs a document that does not depend on his mouth. I can see that you have none.”
He wanted to refuse her at once, in Royal Forms, with the proper clauses. He found, to his irritation, that he was listening. She was not offering to bind him. She was offering to write the thing he had been trying to write in his head for three nights, which was a sentence that would let him stand in the Chamber without having to decide everything himself.
“You may draft it,” he said. “The Chamber will read it, and the Chamber will vote on it.”
“Naturally,” said Ossane. “That is the only part I would never try to take from you.”
He went down the stair with the empty bowl in his hand. At the bottom, in the court, he heard the Watch bell on the north tower ring twice, a short double note that carried over the frozen marsh. He looked up. Ysra stood in the tower’s mouth with her lantern held out over the wall, and she was pointing south-west along the Lessary Road, where the snow had stopped and the moon lay flat on the ice.
A single rider was coming up the road from the Lantern Ford, moving slowly. Idrin could not see his colours at that distance, but he could see the pennant, a thin green streak against the white, and he could see that the rider was not hurrying. He was letting himself be seen.