The Hold had no hall fit for a parliament, and so its first parliament met in the cellar. It sat on casks. Idrin had chosen the casks himself, because they were the only furniture in the building that had not been broken, and he had rolled three of the largest into a rough half-circle under the lamp and sat on the first of them with the Register open across his knees. It was an upturned wine butt, round and heavy and tight-staved. It creaked under him when he shifted. He did not shift very often.
Tallow sat on the second cask to his left, the notebook open on his forearm and the charcoal stub between his fingers. He had ruled a fresh margin down the first leaf, and he had written at the top of it, in square capitals, THE CHAMBER OF HANDS, and then had looked at the words for a while as though they might rearrange themselves if he waited. He had not added a date.
Harrow sat on a mason’s block at the end of the row, a square of dressed limestone the height of a stool, with his hands on his knees. He was counting the floor-flags. He did it under his breath, in a rhythm that rose and fell like the sea, and every so often he stopped and frowned at a flag that had a crack in it, and then went on.
Pell sat on the bottom step of the cellar stair, with her spoon in her hand and a heel of bread in the other. She had brought the bread down to eat, she said, because a parliament without bread was a funeral, and the Chamber would need its strength for the vote. She was not eating it. She was looking at Korrin.
Korrin stood against the central pillar, where the cuffs had grown from the stone, with his arms hanging loose and the chain between his wrists lying in a shallow grey loop across his stomach. The cuffs had grown longer overnight. Idrin had watched them do it, very slowly, as a vine lengthens toward a window. He was not pleased about it.
“The chain is too long,” he said, for the third time since they had sat down.
“It’s the length it was made,” said Tallow, without looking up.
“It’s the length a fool would make it, if he wanted me to have room to swing.” Korrin shifted his weight, and the cuffs clinked softly against the pillar. “Shorten it.”
“I can’t shorten it,” said Tallow. “It’s not mine to shorten. You’re the one who’s chained.”
“Then tell the stone.”
“The stone doesn’t take minutes.”
Ysra stood at the foot of the cellar stair with her back to the wall and her eyes on the steps above. She had not sat down at all. She had come down with the others, and taken her place at the bottom, and she had been looking up the stair since she arrived, the way she had looked up the north stair on the night of the grey shape. Idrin had asked her, once, whether she would not rather sit. She had said that the stair was counted, and that she would rest when it had been counted again.
“We have to decide the question,” said Idrin.
He said it in the court voice, and he felt the words fall heavily into the cellar air, and he was aware that every head in the room had turned toward him. He had not planned to open the sitting with so formal a sentence. But the casks made him formal. The lamp made him formal. The sight of Korrin chained to the pillar, and Pell with her bread and her face set, and Tallow waiting with his pencil, made him feel that he was the one who had to speak first, because the others could not.
“The marsh-men,” said Idrin. “There are two of them in the cellar. A ferryman’s brother and a reed-cutter who was hurt at the causeway. They were taken on the first night. Are they prisoners of the Hold, or are they guests?”
“Prisoners,” said Korrin at once.
“Guests,” said Pell, with her mouth full.
“The question,” said Harrow, “has too many stones in it.”
Nobody laughed. Idrin would remember that afterward. It was not a silence of disapproval. It was the silence of a room in which the same thought has come to several people at once and no one is quite sure how to put it.
“A guest,” said Tallow, slowly, looking at the page, “is one who enters the Hold of his own will and is received under its law. A prisoner is one who is taken and held against his will by the Hold’s power. The distinction is in the Writ of Vacancy, as I read it, in the clause on those who come within the bounds of a Hold.” He turned the page of the notebook and looked at a line in his own neat writing. “Every living man who enters a Hold under this Writ is a guest of the Hold, until he is named in the Hold’s Register or the Hold’s own term is broken.”
“Those men didn’t enter under any Writ,” said Korrin.
“They entered under their own feet,” said Tallow, mildly. “The Writ does not distinguish. It only says enters.”
“The Writ is a Lessary Writ,” said Idrin. “It was written for ground that belongs to the Crown.”
“Then the Crown’s own clerk wrote that the living who came onto its ground were guests,” said Tallow. “I’m only quoting. I haven’t got a view.”
“You’ve got a view,” said Korrin.
“I have a figure,” said Tallow, “and I’m keeping it to myself.”
Idrin looked round the circle. He saw Pell’s face, set and stubborn, with her jaw working on the bread. He saw Harrow’s hands on his knees, and the slow rhythm of his lips as he counted the floor. He saw Korrin’s flat furious stare at the chain. He saw Ysra at the stair, motionless, with her back to the wall, and he could not tell whether she had heard any of it.
“We should vote,” he said.
“We can’t vote,” said Tallow.
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t know what counts as a voice.” Tallow looked up, and there was a mild, precise frown on his face. “The Hold has five awake, and one of the five is chained to a pillar. Each of us has a labour-share to vote with, or we will have, when the Charter is written. But I can’t tell you whether a voice from the stair counts, or whether a voice that says nothing counts, or whether a voice that’s only a Murmur counts at all. The Writ of Vacancy doesn’t say. The Register doesn’t say. Nobody has ever asked the Hold to count its own votes before.”
“Then we’ll decide that first,” said Idrin.
“We can’t decide it first,” said Tallow. “It’s a vote. You’d need to count the voices in order to decide the rule for counting the voices, and we haven’t got the rule yet. It’s a loop.” He looked pained. “It’s a very bad loop.”
Pell had finished her bread. She licked her thumb and looked at it with satisfaction. “Then don’t vote,” she said. “Not tonight. The marsh-men’s raft is still lying in the reeds, and the reeve hasn’t come for it. Wait till he’s taken it back, and then the Hold can see whether the reeve comes for his men. If he does, we’ll know they’re guests. If he doesn’t, then they’re prisoners, and I’ll feed them anyway, and you can all sit here arguing till I’ve finished the broth.”
“Two days,” said Idrin.
“Two days,” agreed Harrow, from his block, without looking up. “That’s a fair number. It has two in it.”
Idrin nodded. The question was not settled, but it was postponed, and he found that the postponing had brought some relief to the room. Korrin’s shoulders came down a little. Pell began to hum. Tallow turned the page and wrote Question: guests or prisoners. Deferred two days. Reason: the counting of voices. Then he looked up again, and his eyes went round the cellar, slowly, with an odd, abstracted frown, as if he were checking the room against a list.
“There are eleven casks,” said Ysra, from the stair.
Idrin turned. She had not moved. She was still standing with her back to the wall and her eyes on the steps, and she had said it in the same flat voice she used for the merlons and the doors.
“Eleven,” said Tallow, peering at the nearest rows. “I make it twelve.”
“Eleven,” said Harrow, without lifting his head from the flags. “And one stone that looks like a cask.”
“There are twelve,” said Tallow again, quite firmly.
“Eleven,” said Ysra. “I’ve counted them. I count them every night. I count the stair, and the casks, and the merlons, and I count the doors, and there’s eleven casks in this cellar, and one of them is standing in the dark where the lamp doesn’t reach, and I can’t see it, and I count it anyway.”
Idrin looked into the corner. The lamp did not reach it. There was a dark cask-shape there, against the far wall, that he had taken for a shadow when he first came down, and he had not looked at it since.
Then he saw that the casks had no bung-marks. None of them had the round stamp of a cooper’s mark on their heads, or the chalked gauge that a cellarman put on a cask he meant to fill again. The staves were dry and grey and clean, and the bungs were out of every one of them, and when Idrin leaned forward and looked into the nearest, he could see that it was empty, and that it had been emptied very carefully, by someone who had meant, at some time, to fill it again.
He said nothing about it. He sat back on his cask, and the wood creaked, and he looked at the dark shape in the corner, and he did not count it.
The lamp went out.
It went out all at once, without any flicker, the flame dropping into darkness like a stone into a well. Pell gave a short sharp cry. Someone’s foot scraped on the stone. Idrin sat in the blackness with his hands on his knees and felt his heart stop, and then start again, and in the sudden silence that followed he could hear the river, far off, and the faint wet sound of Harrow’s breathing as he counted under his breath in the dark.
Then, from the pillar, the chain rattled.
It rattled once, a single short clink of iron against iron, the sound a chain makes when it has been pulled taut and then let go. It was not Korrin moving. Korrin had not moved. The sound came from the cuffs on his wrists, and it was quite deliberate, and it had the exact, clean, unhurried rhythm of a number being counted off.
Nobody spoke. In the dark, Idrin thought he heard Tallow whisper a figure to himself, very softly, under his breath, as a clerk checks his sum a second time before he commits it to ink.