Idrin wrote at a table that had once belonged to his father.
It was not the same table. The one in the palace at Sallowmere had been oak with brass corners and a green baize top that his father had kept scraped clean, and it had stood in a room with three windows and a view of the Assembly’s roofs. This one was a plain board on trestles, scrubbed pale, which the Hold had dug out of the Gatehouse cellar on the first day of the spring. The writing-box on it was the same, though. Somebody in Sallowmere had packed it with the royal seal and a sheaf of blank Forms and sent it north on a cart in a year when the Crown still believed it had a seventh son to keep busy, and the box had come through the marsh and the Lessary Road and the Ruined Bridge, and the Hold had found it in the Gatehouse with its lid still locked. Tallow had opened it with a nail. Idrin had felt something close to grief when he saw the seal inside, and then something closer to embarrassment, because the grief had been for his father’s handwriting on the lid, and his father had never once written a letter to him.
