The Hold did not turn away a guest at its gate, and Pell had told the Warden so at the start of the Hearing week, when he came into the Kitchen with his mouth set tight and asked, very formally, whether the Chancery’s clerks might be fed. She had said yes before he finished the sentence. Then she had said she would serve them herself, and he had looked at her as though a condition was about to follow. None did. Pell did not put conditions on bread. She put them on people, afterward, and generally in front of witnesses.
By the time the Hold’s bell had gone for the second watch, the Chancery was mostly gone, and the bread-hall was hers again. She stood in the middle of it with flour to her elbows, a copper of barley soup ticking on the back of the stove, and the rising trough at her left hand breathing out a sour warm smell, because somebody had left the lid off and somebody was going to be sorry. Three copyists sat at the long bench under the rafters, eating with the grim concentration of men who had been told the bread was costing somebody money. A fourth lay in the bed-loft above the oven with a blanket to his chin and a cough like a bellows left out in the rain.
