The Charter had one Tithe, and it was a Form, and Harrow had known what kind of Form it would be before the clerk said the word aloud in the Chamber.
He had known because the Mason’s Yard had only one spare in it. The Yard had a stone-lift, which was the Form that had woken him at the broken gate in the first hard winter of the Hold, and the Yard had the lift’s copy, which had been cast in the Undercroft from the Build original and had never once been worn. A copy like that was a waiting thing. It sat in its niche under a lid of oiled oak, with its joints folded, and it had the look of a coat on a peg in a house where the owner has gone away and not yet come back.
He told the Chamber in the morning. He told them in the Yard’s own order, one clause at a time, and he counted the words as he said them, because a sentence he had not counted was a sentence he could not trust to stand up under a load. A Charter Tithe was one Form Lent for one season. The Mason’s Yard would lend the spare. The spare would go to the north wall and work the stone-lift beside the original, so that the lift had two pairs of arms for the rest of the season and the courses went up faster. At the end of the season the…
