He spoke the Writ at the first grey light, with his hand flat on the blackened stone, and the wall answered him.
It did not answer in words. It answered in warmth. The stone under his palm had been cold since the night, cold and wet and gritty with the Watch’s water and the pitch that had dried to a crust along the courses. Then, as the first words left his mouth, it began to warm. It was not the warmth of the sun, which had not yet cleared the marsh, and it was not the heat of the fire, which had gone out at the cooper’s hearth an hour before and left only a smell of wet ash behind it. It was a slow even warmth that came up through the weft beneath the parapet and spread along the whole face of the north wall, from the tower to the western corner, in a single line, like a current finding its channel in a river-bed that had been waiting for it.
He said the naming of the site. He said the north wall, from the north tower to the western corner, which is one place and one stone. He said that no fire set by any crown’s servant should take hold of that stone while the Hold’s voices held the Writ. He said the words the way the Chancery’s clerks had taught him to say a Writ in Sallowmere, clean and short, with no ornament. Then, because the Writ…
