Korrin stood because sitting was for people with nothing to carry.
He had carried a great many things in his life. A bar of marsh iron across a ditch. A boy with a broken collarbone across a field, and a sack of salt on his back all the way from the Reed-Houses to the Lantern Ford causeway, and three men’s lives, which he had carried for a little while in his hands and then let fall into the water because the Mantle had stopped his arm. He did not like sitting. Sitting made a man into a thing that other men could look down on, and Korrin had been looked down on by enough Lessaran officers to know how much it cost.
He put his hands on the back of the bench in front of him. The wood was smooth, rubbed by a great many Hands.
“The granaries are a day’s ride west,” he said. “Lessary’s. Full.”
He had said this before, in the Chamber, and in the gatehouse, and once in the Lowgate queue, where a woman had told him to go and sit down. He said it again now because it was true, and because the others had been talking about bells for an hour as though a bell could be eaten. A bell could not be eaten. A bell could only be looked at, and listened to, and counted, and the Hold had had enough of looking.
