Tallow stood at the bridge-end with the Hold’s brief in its oilcloth under his arm, and he had written the parley’s minute in his head as he heard it, word for word, which was a discipline he had learned from the Ink.
It was not a discipline he had chosen. It had been given to him at the gatehouse board in the first week of the Hold, when the Warden had asked him to read back the first line of the Register and he had read it back perfectly, and the Warden had said, very gently, that he had not asked for the sense of it. He had asked for the words. Tallow had been trying to give him the words ever since. He held them now, in the order they came, and he did not let any of them slip.
The King was speaking for the minute.
He had put his voice up a little, very evenly, so that the Lessary escort on the far bank could hear every word of it and the Hold’s Watch at the bridge-end could hear it too. He was speaking in the Chancery’s language, which had no ornament and no mercy in it, and which was perfectly suited to a minute, because a minute was only a record of what had been said by people who would later pretend they had not said it.
