Gaunt had objected to every proposal in the Hold since the morning he woke at the forge. He had objected to the bellows, to the coal, to the Warden’s first Writ and to the second, to the grade of iron the Lessaran carts brought up the road and to the grade of the bread that the Kitchen sent down to him in the mornings, which he had been objecting to, with great pleasure, for the better part of two years. He had objected to his own hammer once, in a fit of temper, and then to the apology he had made to it. Objecting was how he thought. It was how he kept his hands honest. A thing that had not been objected to, in his experience, was a thing that had been left to rot.
So when he woke on the morning after he walked out of the Chamber, and found that the silence had got into his chest like a swallowed nail, he lay a long while on his straw pallet in the forge loft and did not get up.
It was not a pain. He would have objected to a pain. It was a stillness, a hard small weight below the breastbone, and when he pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth and tried to say the first word of the day, which was always no, nothing came out but air.
