Idrin had decided that the Hold could not go to a Chancery commission with a child asleep in its bones. He had thought about it for three nights, lying awake in the gatehouse with the lamp out and the wall-timbers ticking as they cooled, and by the third night the reasoning had seemed so simple that he could not understand why nobody had reached it before him. A Hand in Quiet was a Hand the commission could point at. A Hand that was awake was a Hand the Chancellor would have to explain. And a child who had counted to nine on the Undercroft stair was, in the Chancellor’s column, a thing that could be counted and then struck.
So he called the Chamber to the Quiet roll.
It was the old list, kept in the back leaves of the Register and copied fair on a loose sheet for the Chamber’s use. The roll named the Hands who were not awake in the Hold, and beside each name it gave the state in which they slept. Only one name had been on the roll in the Hold’s first winter. It had been Pim’s since the autumn. It stood at the foot of the list, in Tallow’s neat hand, between the Keystone’s notches and the gatehouse board: Pim, carrier. Quiet, Writ-held.
