Tallow prepared the Register for a commission that would want to see it and might not be permitted to. He did this with the care he gave to every document that mattered, which was to say slowly, with several pencils, and without once touching the book itself, because the Writ of Hearth now held the gatehouse and he had the sense to feel the words in the room the way one feels a cold draught through a door.
The Register lived on its wooden stand in the middle of the gatehouse floor. It was a heavy thing, bound in boards of dark oak with a clasp of old iron, and it had been opened, to Tallow’s knowledge, perhaps nine times in the Hold’s whole history. He had opened it himself on the morning he woke, when his hand had gone to the page as though it had been waiting there. He had not opened it since, except to read the Hold’s own minutes into its back leaves, and he did not intend to open it now. He stood instead at the foot of the gatehouse wall, beside the board, and looked at the first line.
It was cut into the old oak with a knife that had been very sharp and very patient. Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing. The letters had been worn by two hundred years of Harrow’s sweeping, and the grain of the wood had risen up round them, so that they looked less like carvings than…
