The Chamber met at candle-clock in the Great Hall, where the old stone was cold enough to make a man keep his coat on and where the Hands had long ago stopped pretending that the high table was a throne. It was a long board of oak on trestles, with nine chairs down one side and eight of them occupied. The ninth chair stood empty at the far end. It had been empty since the autumn, and it was the only chair in the Hall that nobody ever moved.
Idrin sat at the head with his coat buttoned, and across the table the Hands sat in the order the Turn required. Pell held the Mouth for the first hour. She had pinned her hair up under a linen cap and rolled her sleeves to the elbow, and she laid her big red hands on the oak as though she were about to knead it. She opened the agenda in the flat voice she used for reading out the price of salt, and she had got as far as the second item when Gaunt stood up.
“I object to the agenda,” he said.
“You have not heard the agenda.”
“I have heard enough of it to know the order is wrong. The fire comes after the bread. That’s wrong. A fire is before everything.”
“The fire is a fire, Gaunt,” said Pell. “The bread is what the fire is for.”
“And that as well.”
He sat down again, and the Chamber let him. It had learned that Gaunt’s objections were like the forge’s bellows: they made a great deal of noise and then stopped, and what they left behind was usually hot. Harrow, beside him, had his cord across his knees and was not counting anything yet. He was looking at the high windows, where the light had gone the colour of pewter.
“Will the weather hold for a ride to the river?” he asked.
Nobody answered him. That was what Harrow had wanted, Idrin thought. A question with no answer sat in the middle of the table and cost nothing, and it kept the Chamber from asking the question it was really there to ask.
In the middle of the board, between the agenda and the bread, lay the thing that had been brought to the Hall in its green wax at the end of the afternoon. Nobody had opened it. It had been placed on the table by Tallow, who had carried it up from the gatehouse step on a clean cloth and set it down as though it were a sleeping cat. Since then it had been passed over, ignored, and discussed, and at every point in the discussion the Chamber had agreed that it was not a summons until somebody read it.
“Then someone read it,” said Korrin. He had not been asked to speak. He spoke anyway, in the short, hard way he had, each word a separate blow. “Burn it. Open it and burn it. Read the fire. It will say the same and cost less.”
“It will say something,” said Sella, from the far end, without looking up from the bone-ledger she was writing in. “Whatever it says, you will have to answer for it, Korrin, so you may as well know what it is.”
“I have answered for worse.”
“You have answered for three men in one afternoon in the marsh, and that answer is still on the table in front of you, and you have never once read it either.”
Korrin’s jaw worked. Then he said nothing, which for Korrin was a kind of surrender, and Idrin saw the old bruise on his knuckles darken as he closed his fist around it.
Tamsin spoke next, very softly, from the low bench under the window where she sat with her hands in her lap and her face turned toward the gap in the shutters. “The goats should be kept away from any commissioner who says the word property to a goat,” she said. “They do not like it. It makes them stand and stare.”
“The goats are not on the agenda, Tamsin,” said Pell.
“No. The goats are on the wall, and they can hear everything. That is why I say it.”
Idrin looked down the table. Eight faces looked back at him, and every one of them, even Gaunt’s, was waiting for him to do the thing that a Warden did. He could feel the weight of their attention on the back of his neck the way he had once felt the heat of his father’s gaze at dinner. He did not like the feeling. He had begun to think that he would never like it, and that this was not the same as having to put it down.
“Tallow,” he said. “Open it.”
Tallow broke the wax with the care of a man opening a will. He did not hurry. He turned the sheet to the candle, held it at a distance from his nose, and read the first lines to himself. His lips moved. Then his face went carefully empty.
“It is from Dorran Halse,” he said. “Chancellor of the Chancery of Lessary. Under the seal of a commission.” He read on in silence for some while, and then he read it aloud, in the level voice he used for minutes, with the stresses placed where the sentences had put them. “It summons the holder of the Lessary subject styled a thing at Ormhold to answer a claim of property before the commission at the Sallow Gate.”
“Styled a thing,” said Gaunt, with venom. “I dislike styled.”
“The commission will sit at the river gate of the Hold, and not at Sallowmere,” Tallow went on, “because the Chancery has decided that its commissioners will ride to the Hold. The Chancellor adds that the Hold may be pleased to receive them at the thaw.”
“At the thaw,” said Harrow. “The thaw depends on the wind.”
“And the wind depends on the marsh,” said Gaunt, who could not help himself.
Tallow had taken a stub of pencil from behind his ear and was working the figures on the margin of the sheet. He muttered the working under his breath. Then he looked up with the air of a man who has found a number he did not want and has decided to report it honestly.
“The river gate sits inside the reach,” he said. “I make it two leagues and three-quarters from the Keystone, with a quarter-league either way for the marsh. The commission will be standing on ground the Hold can count. It will not be on any ground that Lessary’s maps have drawn.”
“The commissioners will bring the marsh with them,” said Gaunt. “They always do. They bring their own mud on their boots.”
“Then we shall have to make them take their boots off at the gate,” said Idrin, and the table laughed, a little. It was the first laugh since the thaw had been promised, and it sounded startled at itself.
“I put the question,” said Idrin, when the laughter had gone. “The Chamber will receive the commission at the river gate, with the Hold’s voices present, and the Register kept at the gatehouse under the Hold’s own word.”
“Voices,” said Tallow, writing. “By voices, not by Full Assent. The question does not bind any Hand to any instrument. It binds the Hold to a conversation.”
“Then I call for voices.”
They gave them, one by one, down the length of the table. Pell said yes with her hands flat on the oak. Harrow said yes, and then, because he could not help it, said that the ford had been counted twice and would bear a cart. Ysra said yes from the door, where she had been standing with her back to the frame and her eyes on the stair. Korrin said yes as though he were spitting. Gaunt said that he objected to the question and that he would vote for it anyway, and Tallow wrote both things down. Tamsin said yes to the goats. Sella said yes last, without raising her head from the ledger, and then added a figure that nobody had asked for, which was the number of days a summons takes to reach the river from Sallowmere in a bad winter.
“That is a yes,” said Tallow, and wrote it.
Idrin picked up the letter from the table. Its last paragraph had not been read aloud, and he read it himself now. Halse wrote that the commission would sit at the thaw, and that its advocate would be received with courtesy, and that the Chancery trusted the Warden would find the Hold’s position sustainable under the Chancery’s terms. The hand was small and even and it did not cross itself out. Under the signature, in the same hand, there was a line that Idrin had not expected to see: I am told you have a marsh-girl and a ledger. I should be glad to see both at the river gate.
He did not read it aloud. He set the letter face down on the cloth and looked at the wall.
“The Chancellor seals his promises at the thaw,” said Harrow, quietly, from the far end. He had not been asked. “The thaw is not a thing a Chancellor can count. I would not put a wall on it.”
“Nobody is putting a wall on anything, Harrow,” said Pell. “It’s a commission. They have a table and a box and a bad sense of humour, and they will want their bread.”
“Then they will get the Kitchen’s bread,” said Harrow, “which is the only thing in Lessary that has never once been paid for in advance.”