Halse’s own letter came at last, under his own seal, in his own hand. The hand was small and even and it never once crossed itself out. Idrin had seen it before, on the summons that Tallow had read aloud at the Chamber table, and on the clerk’s courtesy notes that came up the Lessary Road each week with the commission’s mail, but he had not until now held a sheet that the Chancellor had written with his own fingers and sealed with his own ring. He turned the letter over in his hands before he opened it, and found that the seal was pale green, and that a small crown sat above a single bar in the wax.
It was the device that Tallow had found pressed into the clean sheet on the Register’s stand.
Idrin said nothing about it at first. He sat at the gatehouse writing table with the lamp turned low and the letter under his right hand, and he looked at the seal for some time, and he thought about the back door of the gatehouse, which Pell had been leaving unbarred all week for her flour, and about the clean white sheet lying square across the oak with the wax on its fold. Halse had written the sheet first. Then he had sent this letter. The Chancellor did not do things in the wrong order. It was the only thing about him that Idrin had ever admired, and he resented the admiration now, because…
