The Hearing was laid out on a trestle platform on the river bank, outside the gate and inside the reach, so that the commission could sit beneath the Hold’s wall without taking a single step past it. Idrin thought the arrangement was deliberate. Halse did nothing by accident, and the Chancellor had chosen this bank, this platform and this wall because each of them could be measured, and because a measure was a kind of argument that nobody needed to make aloud.
The platform was a neat square of planks laid over the mud and braced with stakes driven deep into the bank. It had a canvas awning on poles at its back, a long trestle table draped in grey cloth, and five chairs set out behind the table with great precision. Halse took the centre chair. He sat down in it slowly, with his gloves folded on his knee and his hat on the table beside his hand, and he looked up at the Hold’s wall with an expression of mild and courteous attention, as though he were waiting for a dish he had ordered to be brought to the table.
On his right sat the clerk with the box of papers. He was a thin, stooped young man with inky fingers and a pale anxious face, and he had laid out his sheets in stacks along the cloth so that each one could be reached without looking. On Halse’s left sat Ossane Tiller.
