The Assembly of Seats sat in a hall of pale stone in the middle of Sallowmere, and Mireille climbed to its lectern with the Census under her arm as though she had been climbing there all her life.
She had practised the climb in her head for nine nights. It was a short climb, twelve steps from the floor of the hall, up a narrow witness-stair that had been cut into the wall on the right-hand side so that a speaker could be seen from both galleries at once. There was a rail of dark wood on the outer edge, polished by a century of hands that had needed to hold on to something. The lectern at the top was plain. The clerk who stood beside it had a pale, careful face and a box of wax seals at his elbow, and he watched her come up the steps without moving a muscle.
Forty benches ran down the hall in tiers. The Seats sat on them in their grey and black, with their hands folded and their faces set in the expressions that Lessaran men wore when they were about to be bored by something they had already decided to vote against. The gallery above them was full. It was full of ordinary people, and Mireille saw, with a small hard shock, that many of them were from the lower town, and that some of them had been in the Quiet Wing’s laundry, and that a few of the women…
