Idrin reached for the fold.
He did it without deciding to, as a hand goes out to catch a cup that is already falling, and his fingers were halfway across the wet stone before he knew what they were doing. He wanted to see the rest of the lease. He wanted it so badly that the wanting frightened him, because it was the same want he had felt at nineteen, reading his first Chancery instrument at his father’s table, when a clerk had put a folded schedule under his nose and told him that the schedule was not his concern. He had obeyed the clerk then. He had obeyed everything then.
Corvin’s hand came down on his wrist.
It was not hard. It was the touch of an elder brother who has seen a younger one reach for a hot pan on the stove and has moved before the reaching has finished. It stopped Idrin’s fingers an inch from the crease. The grip was firm and unhurried, and the palm of it was cold, colder than the rain, and when Idrin looked down at it he saw the ink under the nails. It was the Chancery’s pale ink, faded to a dull grey at the cuticles, as a clerk’s hands are stained when he has written for twenty years and never once washed the stain away.
