Tallow had been sent to minute the lady’s conversations. He had read the sentence twice in the Chamber’s record before he understood that it had been written about him. The Chamber had decided that any word spoken to a Lessaran must go into the Register of Tithe, since that was the only book the Hold kept that frightened nobody. Nobody else had wanted the job. Pell said she would sooner scrub the bakehouse floor with her teeth. Gaunt said that a Smith did not take dictation from a Chancery. Korrin had not been asked, because the Chamber had decided that Korrin’s minutes would be mostly the word “no.”
So Tallow carried the cask-stool up the gatehouse stair with a board on one knee, two pens in his coat, and his good ink in a bottle with a cork he had cut himself. He knocked. Ossane told him to come in. She had a pad of Lessaran paper open on the table and a cup of Pell’s tea at her elbow, and she looked up with the bright, unhurried attention she gave to people she meant to remember.
“Master Tallow,” she said. “Good morning. I am told you are to minute me.”
“I am to minute the conversation,” said Tallow. “You are only the part of it that talks.”
“Then I shall try to talk in complete sentences, for your sake.” She moved the cup an inch to make room for his board. “Ask me anything you like. I should enjoy being on the right side of a clerk for once.”
He sat on the stool, set the board on his knee, and wrote the date in the margin, the way the Chamber’s rule required. Then he looked up at her. “You may begin by reading me the line from the gatehouse board,” she said. “I have been told it by three people, and each of them gave it a different stress.”
Tallow did not need the board. He closed his eyes and gave her the line as it was cut into the old oak, with the stops where the grain broke the letters. “Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing.”
“Thank you. And what is the word resident meant to do?”
“It is meant to say that the entry has a place of residence and does not intend to leave it.” Tallow considered, and gave her three meanings, each held with a different degree of confidence. The first was the plain one, the second was the one the Ink seemed to prefer, and the third was the one that he had privately hoped nobody would ask him about. He ended on the third. “The line was written in the Ink,” he said. “I cannot say whose hand the Ink is. I have looked. The Ink has no hand I can name.”
Ossane wrote something short on her pad. “In Lessary,” she said, “resident is the word a landlord writes when he has not yet agreed the rent.”
Tallow felt offended on the Register’s behalf. He wrote the remark down anyway, word for word, because it was accurate and because he was a clerk, and a clerk who edits what he is told is a clerk who will one day be asked to explain himself to a court. Ossane watched him do it with an expression of mild approval, the way Harrow watched a course of stones go up true.
She asked him to read back the entry he had made about the Writ of Lodging, which was the minute of an earlier conversation, and he did. She listened with her head on one side. Then she said that the sentence about the Lodgers’ ledger had a dangling clause in it, and that a lodger in a sentence should be the subject of the verb, not the object of the Chamber’s pity. She put a hand over the page and read the corrected line aloud. It was better. Tallow was so delighted that for almost a full breath he forgot to be annoyed, and then he remembered, and was annoyed with himself for forgetting.
“That is not grammar,” he said. “That is advocacy.”
“Those are close cousins, Master Tallow. Most good grammar is advocacy that has learned to keep its temper.”
Ossane asked him how long he had been awake, and Tallow gave her the honest answer, which was the one he gave the Chamber and Harrow and, on bad mornings, his own reflection in the water-butt. He had woken at the Register board in the first winter with a pencil in his fist and an entire line already in his head: the first line, in a colourless hand that seemed to him, the longer he stared at it, to be a hand he could have written himself. He had not told anyone that. A clerk does not claim a hand he cannot prove, and a clerk who claims a hand he has not proved is a clerk who will one day be asked to swear to it in Sallowmere.
“Then you are the Ink’s own clerk,” said Ossane, very gently, as if she had found a stone in his bread and did not want to be the one to point at it.
“I am a clerk who keeps the Ink’s minutes,” said Tallow. “That is a different range.”
“It is always a different range, with your sort.” She made a small note in the margin of her pad. “Do the Hands sleep, Master Tallow? I ask as a lawyer, because a witness who does not sleep is a witness who remembers the wrong things.”
“We sleep in the bones,” said Tallow. “Nine of us, in nine places, for about six hours a night. Harrow sleeps counting. Ysra sleeps with her back to a door. Pell does not sleep at all, but she is very rude about the people who do.” He paused, considering the question as he considered every question, from every side. “I cannot say what the Mantle does. I can say only that it has never once asked for a bed.”
“No,” said Ossane. “I should not expect it would.”
They quarrelled next, briefly and with pleasure, about whether a Lessaran summons could be called a paper. Ossane said it could not, since a paper was a thing a man kept, and a summons was a thing that was sent to be obeyed. Tallow said a paper was anything the Chamber had minuted, and he produced the Charter of Shares to prove it, and read the clause in which the Chamber had minuted its own tithe-cart as a paper, which nobody had ever called it anywhere else. Ossane conceded the cart. She did not concede the summons.
“Then I would like a copy of the Register,” she said, when he had put the Charter away. “To take to Sallowmere. Your Warden has said that the Hold will be heard, and I should like to bring the Hold’s first line with me, in the Hold’s own hand, so that the Assembly can see it is the same line the Chancellor will be reading.”
“The Register does not leave the gatehouse.”
“Does it not?”
“It does not.” Tallow did not need to look at the minutes for this one, and he did not, and he gave the clause from memory with a clerk’s pleasure in its exact wording. “The Register is kept in the Gatehouse and is carried out of it by the Keeper’s leave alone. It is the only clause I am permitted to quote today.”
Ossane wrote the clause on her own pad, letter for letter, with a small and careful hand. She blotted it and looked at it as a woman looks at a receipt. “Thank you,” she said. “I shall bring that to the Hearing, if there is one.”
“If there is one,” said Tallow. “You are sure there will be one?”
“No,” said Ossane. “I am sure the Chancellor will send a commission. Whether it sits depends on what my Chancellor wants, and whether he wants to win or wants to be right.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Not for Dorran Halse,” said Ossane, “but for everyone else in the room there is, and that is why I keep a pad.”
Tallow turned the page of his board and wrote the answer down under the date. Then he stopped, because she had gone quiet, and when he looked up she was looking at the window. She had the expression of a woman who had been expecting a particular footstep and had just heard it on the stair.
“Your Hold has a lovely bread,” she said. “And a very poor sense of when to stop counting things. I think you will need both before the thaw.”
Below in the court, a boy from the Watch came running across the frozen cobbles with a packet held out in front of him in both hands, as a boy carries something he has been told is hot. Tallow could see from the window that the packet was sealed with wax, and that the wax was the same pale green as the pennant Ysra had seen on the Lessary Road. The boy reached the gatehouse step, set the packet down on the stone as though it might bite, and ran back toward the gate without once looking round. Nobody in the court went to pick it up. Everybody in the court looked at it instead, as though it might do something on its own.
Ossane stood up, smoothed her grey skirt, and went to the stair-head to listen. “That will be for the Warden,” she said, without turning round. “Or for the Chamber. Or, I expect, for the clerk who is minuting me.”