The stable block stood at the back of the inner ward, a long low building of grey stone with a roof of stacked slate and a row of half-doors along its north wall. Some of the doors had rotted, and some had been replaced with planks that did not match, and one had been taken off its hinges altogether and leaned against the wall outside like a sleeper who had not yet decided to wake. The straw inside was old and dry. The smell was of hay gone stale and leather gone hard, and under those, very faintly, of horse. Idrin had not expected the smell to comfort him. It did.
The grey was standing in the third stall. It had been put there the first night, by Jory, who had said that a horse which had come up the Lessary Road under a prince deserved a stall with a roof on it, and who had then gone off to find a bucket of oats and had not come back with the oats. The grey had found its own. It had been eating from a split trough of rainwater and mouldering grain, and when Idrin came along the stalls, it lifted its head and watched him with its ears forward and its dark eyes steady and unsurprised.
He stopped at the half-door. The grey put its nose over the top of it and blew, a warm soft breath that smelled of grass and dust, and then it pushed its muzzle against the front of his coat, the way it had done every morning on the Lessary Road, searching for the pocket where the apples had been.
“There’s no apple,” said Idrin. “I’ve nothing for you.”
The horse went on searching. Its breath was warm through the wool. Idrin put his hand on its neck, under the mane, where the coat was thick and smooth, and felt the strong heavy pulse of its blood against his palm. It was a good horse. He had always known that. It was the best horse in the Lessary stables, and it had carried him out of the only city he had ever known with his name struck from the book and his brother’s voice still ringing in his ears, and it had never once shied, bolted or bitten him. It had been the one thing in his life that had not wanted anything from him.
He reached for its name.
He had been reaching for it since the morning of the Writ. He had reached for it while he ate, and while he walked the wall, and while he sat with Tallow in the gatehouse and listened to the clerk’s dry patient voice reading the minutes back to him. He had reached for it in the night, lying on the pallet with his boots on, and he had felt for the shape of it as a man feels for a stair in the dark. He had the shape. He could feel where the name sat in his mind, like the place where a tooth has come out. He could feel its rhythm, two beats, falling. He could feel that it had been given with love, on a summer morning, in the paddocks at Sallowmere, and that he had been very pleased with himself for choosing it.
He tried to say it aloud.
His mouth opened. The sound that came out was only breath. He tried again, softer, in a whisper, as a child says a word it is not sure it has learned, and again nothing came. He tried a third way, very slowly, syllable by syllable, the way his tutor had made him say the verbs of the Royal Forms, and the result was a kind of grunt, a bruised sound with no meaning in it. He closed his mouth. He stood with his hand on the grey’s neck and felt the horse’s head shift under his chin, patiently, as though it had heard the attempt and did not expect any better.
“Well,” said Idrin, quietly, to the horse. “That’s a poor return for a fine animal.”
The grey blew softly into his coat.
“Are you talking to the horse?” asked Tallow from the stable doorway.
Idrin turned round. The clerk was standing in the shadow of the lintel with the minutes in his hand and his pencil behind his ear. He had come quietly, the way he did everything, and he looked at Idrin’s face and then at the horse and then, with a small deliberate movement, at the notebook in his hand, as though he were checking that it had not been affected by the conversation.
“I was trying to say its name,” said Idrin.
“Ah,” said Tallow. He did not come any closer. “And you can’t.”
“No.”
“Then the Writ has taken it.” Tallow opened his notebook on his forearm. He turned to a page marked with a neat strip of linen, and ran his finger down it, and then read aloud in a dry precise voice that did not waver. “The Writ of the Gate. Entry, Register line 0202. One memory taken. The Register does not say which.” He looked up. “I wrote that down on the first morning. I’ve been looking at it since, because I didn’t like the look of it. You didn’t notice the taking then. You’ve noticed it now.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. The Register doesn’t say.”
“But you know it was the name.”
“I know it was a memory of yours,” said Tallow carefully, “and that you have lost the name of a horse, and that you have been looking for it since. I’d guess that’s the same thing. But I don’t know it. A guess is only a range, Highness. I’d put it at nine parts in ten, and I’m not going to sign for the remaining one.”
Idrin looked at the horse. The grey had turned its head toward the clerk now, with an air of polite interest, and was regarding him with one ear cocked.
“Does it have a name?” he asked.
Tallow considered the question with evident seriousness. “The horse is a horse,” he said at last. “That’s a fact. I can write it down. Grey mare or grey gelding, which I’d put at nine to one in favour of gelding, given the look of it. But a name isn’t a fact. A name is a thing a man chooses, and the choice was yours, and so the name is yours to keep. Nobody else can keep it for you. The Register won’t. It’s not built for that.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Describe the horse,” said Tallow.
Idrin frowned. “Why?”
“Because the Register will keep the description,” said Tallow, “if you give it one. It keeps facts. It doesn’t keep names, which is a great relief to a clerk, because names are always being changed by the people who use them. But it will keep a description, if it’s exact enough. Describe the horse to me, the way you’d describe it to a farrier who was going to shoe it and didn’t know the animal. Then I’ll write it in the minutes, and it’ll be there when you come to read them, whether you’ve got the name or not.”
Idrin did not like the idea. He felt, obscurely, that it was a sort of surrender. But the clerk was waiting with his pencil lifted and his face patient, and the grey was looking at him with its dark steady eyes, and it seemed suddenly important to get it right.
“It’s a grey,” he said. “Dappled at the flank, but not much. The coat’s darker along the spine and lighter under the belly. It has a white star on the forehead, a little off to the left, shaped like a hand with the thumb turned in. It’s sixteen hands high, or near it, and it stands squarely on its forelegs, and its near hind has a bad hoof. The left, I mean, the left hind. It’s a little flat along the wall, and the farrier said it would need a shoe with a rim. It carries its head high on the road and lower in the stall, and when it’s frightened it doesn’t bolt. It sidles. It goes sideways toward whatever is closed, as a horse will toward a gate it wants to be let through. It did that every day on the Lessary Road. It did it at every bridge.”
Tallow wrote it down. He wrote quickly, in his small square letters, and he did not interrupt once. When Idrin stopped, the clerk read it back, every word, in the same flat cadence he had used for the Writ. Then he looked up.
“It’s a good description,” he said. “I’d sign for it. The farrier would sign for it. The Register will keep it.”
“It isn’t the name.”
“No,” said Tallow, and for a moment there was something almost gentle in his dry voice. “The description is a fact. The name was a gift. You can’t put a gift back in a ledger, Highness. Not even this one.”
Idrin looked at the horse. He found that his eyes had gone hot and blurred, and he was ashamed of it, and he did not turn away from the animal’s face. The grey was still watching him. Then it turned its head, slowly, and went back to its trough, and began to eat the mouldering grain with the same placid, steady attention it had given to everything since the Lessary Road.
Harrow came along the stalls behind them. He had a measuring rod on his shoulder, a long length of ash marked in paces, and he was counting the stalls under his breath as he went, one, two, three, the way he counted everything. He reached the third stall and stopped, and frowned, and looked at the floor, and then at the wall, and then back at the stall.
“Too long,” he said.
“What is?” asked Idrin.
“This stall. It’s one pace longer than the one next to it. Look at the planking.” Harrow laid the rod along the floor, flat, and tapped the end of it against the back wall. “It’s a stall for a horse of sixteen hands, which this one is, but it’s been built for a horse of fifteen. The partition’s out by a pace. Somebody built it wrong.” He looked at the grey, and then at Idrin, with the same mild, steady professional gaze he gave to the stones. “That horse has been standing in the wrong place for a month. It’s been stood with its quarters at the back wall, and its head in the wrong direction, and it’s not been able to turn round in comfort since the Hold was counted.”
“You’ve been measuring the stalls.”
“I’ve been counting them,” said Harrow. “Since the first morning. They’re all sound except this one.”
Idrin stared at him. “That’s the first fact anyone has told me about my own horse,” he said, and was surprised to hear how unsteady his voice was.
Harrow shrugged, slowly, as a man does who has said nothing that required a reply. He lifted the measuring rod back onto his shoulder, looked once more at the grey, and went on along the stalls, counting, toward the far door.