Idrin decided for everyone before the sun was high. He did not think about it first. That was the trouble, and he would admit it to himself only much later, in the gatehouse, with the lamp low and the notebook open on his knee. He had been brought up to decide. Every day of his childhood someone had stood at his elbow with a document and a pen and said, Your Highness will wish to determine the matter, and he had determined it, and the matter had gone away, and no one had ever asked him how it felt to be the one who closed the door.
So he decided about the boy.
He had sat up in the gatehouse all night after the reeve had gone, listening to the river and turning over the words Bardo had spoken on the causeway. The Crown used to call us guests, too. He had heard the phrase no longer required again and again, and the cold fish-scales of Ysra’s count had lain on the back of his mind like a cold coin under a tongue. A reeve’s son in a kitchen was a risk. A reeve’s son who could walk out of the arch and tell the marsh what he had seen inside the Hold was a greater one. The Hold needed to be protected. It was a prince’s first duty to protect what was his, and the Hold was his, by a Writ and a line in a register, and a prince did not leave the protection of his own realm to a cook’s notion of kindness.
He wrote the order in the morning, in the Forms, on the Chancery paper he had brought from Lessary. He was careful about it. He wrote The guest Corran Kell, of the marsh-towns, is hereby held as a prisoner of the Hold for the Hold’s safety, until the Chamber shall determine his term. He signed it with his name and his rank, Idrin Saelmar, Pretender, and he sealed it with a dribble of wax from the gatehouse candle, and he gave it to Tallow to carry down to the kitchen. Tallow took it without a word, with the air of a man carrying a bad sum to the bank, and went off down the yard.
Then he went down to the cellar himself, and stood at the foot of the stair with his hands clasped behind his back, and waited for the Chamber to meet.
He had not thought about the bread. That was the second mistake, and it was the one he would remember longest. He had not known that Pell had put a loaf aside for the boy that morning, on the bench by the oven, wrapped in a clean cloth with a thick sliver of cheese beside it, because she had woken before the sun to bake and had not been able to bring herself to waste the dough. He had not seen the cloth. He had only seen Tallow come back up the yard, empty-handed and grey, and he had not thought to wonder why the clerk’s face was so pale.
Pell came down the cellar stair like a storm.
She did not run. She did not need to. She came down step by step with the bread-knife in one hand and the cloth in the other, and her face was red to the hairline, and she stopped on the bottom step with her knees a little apart and looked at the prince as if he had sprouted horns.
“You’ve sent it,” said Pell.
“I’ve sent an order,” said Idrin, with dignity. “It was necessary.”
“You’ve sent a boy with a broken arm to the Hold’s own cellar with a prisoner’s paper in his hand, and you’ve done it from the top of the stairs, without looking at him, and I’ll not have it. Not in my kitchen. Not in the Hold.” She came down the last step and stood square in front of him. “You’re a prince who decides for people. That’s what you are. I’ve watched you do it since the first morning. You decide what the gate is, and what the wall is, and what the sacks are for, and now you’ve decided what a boy’s to be, and you did it with a pen, sat up in your gatehouse like a clerk with the cold in his heels.”
“It is a royal duty to protect the Hold.”
“It’s a royal duty to feed it,” said Pell. “That’s a bigger duty, and you’ve never once done it. You don’t know how many mouths there are, and you don’t know who’s hungry, and you think a prince is someone who writes a word and makes it stick. A prince who decides for people is a prince who’s forgotten they can eat for themselves.”
Idrin opened his mouth to reply, and found that the reply had gone out of him. He stood and stared at her. Behind her on the stair, Ysra had come down silently and stopped halfway, her hand on the rock, her face turned toward the two of them with an expression of stony attention.
“Tallow,” said Idrin, a little too loudly, as though calling a clerk might restore the order of the room.
Tallow was at the bottom of the cellar, on the second cask, the notebook open on his arm. He did not raise his head. He turned the page and ran his finger down a line of his own handwriting, and when he spoke it was in the flat, careful, precise tone of a man reading a clause he has been asked to quote and has no intention of interpreting.
“The Writ of Vacancy,” said Tallow. “Quoted at the sitting, and entered. A 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. No term has been set for the boy. The Chamber has not set one. You’ve written a prisoner’s paper without a term, Your Highness, and the Writ does not permit a guest to be held on a paper without one.” He lifted his eyes. “It’s a bad sum. I’m sorry. I can give you a figure if you’d like one, but I don’t think you will.”
“Harrow,” said Idrin, desperately.
Harrow sat on his block with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the cellar floor. He had not stopped counting. He did not stop now, but his lips paused for a moment in the middle of a sequence, and then went on.
“The wall doesn’t like being decided for,” he said, in his deep flat voice. “It sulks. It goes stiff in the joints, and it lets the gate-chain shiver, and it’ll not set a stone square till somebody asks it nicely. I’ve been putting the gate-foot straight for a week, and I can feel it sulking now.” He kept his eyes down. “You’ve decided for the boy, and the boy’s going to feel it in his arm.”
“Korrin,” said Idrin, because there was nowhere else to turn.
Korrin was at the pillar, with the cuffs on his wrists and the chain in his lap. He had been listening with his flat, impassive face, and when he spoke it was in his short blunt way, the imperatives clipped to the bone.
“The decision is correct,” he said. “The boy’s a risk. Keep him in. Keep him under a Writ. He’ll sell us to the marsh by the spring if you give him the chance. But the manner’s weak.” His dark eyes met Idrin’s. “You sent a paper. You didn’t go yourself. You didn’t stand in the kitchen and tell him to his face. A Hold that puts its order in a boy’s hand and doesn’t look him in the eye has lost the argument before it’s started. That’s the only thing I’m sure of.”
Idrin stood motionless. He looked round the cellar at the five of them: the cook with her knife and her red face; the clerk with his notebook and his range; the mason with his hands on his knees; the watchwoman on the stair; and the Lash, chained to his pillar, looking at him with his flat unforgiving calm. None of them was angry with him in the way he had been taught that subjects were angry. They were simply waiting, as a room waits when a man has spoken the wrong word in a sentence he has been given to finish.
He could feel his own habit in the room. He could feel it on his tongue, in his chest, in the set of his shoulders, the old reflex that said determine the matter and close the door and have it entered. It had been trained into him so thoroughly that he had never once heard it speak. He heard it now, and it sounded exactly like his brother’s voice.
He said nothing.
He said nothing for a while. The lamp burned on the cask. The river ran. Somewhere above them, through the stone, the wind rose and fell over the wall. Tallow turned a page and did not write anything. Pell’s knife had slid down into her apron, and she stood with her hands loose at her sides, waiting. Idrin looked at the floor. He was aware of the silence the way one is aware of cold water rising up a stair, one step at a time, without any hurry at all.
Pell moved first. She did not say anything. She turned, went up the stairs past Ysra, who flattened herself against the wall to let her by, and out through the cellar door into the yard. Idrin heard her footsteps cross the flags, unhurried and heavy, and heard the kitchen door open and close.
Then she came back.
She came down the stairs with the cloth in her hands, folded and clean, and inside it, Idrin could see, the bread she had baked before dawn, two thick brown slices, and the cheese beside them. She did not come to the cellar at all. She stopped at the top of the steps, outside the open door, and bent down and set the cloth on the step, very carefully, as a woman lays a baby’s blanket on a cradle, and smoothed the edges flat with her floury hand.
She did not say anything. She straightened up and went back into the kitchen. The door closed.
That was the only argument she had ever needed, Idrin thought, and felt the shame of it go through him like a draught.
He did not sleep that night. He sat in the gatehouse with the lamp low and the notebook open, and he wrote the sentence he had not been able to say aloud in the cellar. I decided for the boy. I did not ask him. I did not go to him. Then he looked at it, and crossed it out, and wrote it again underneath, in plainer words, and found that the plainer words were harder to write.
He went to the cellar at last, toward the middle of the night, with the lamp in his hand and a determination in his chest that he had not felt before. He would go to the kitchen. He would stand in the doorway and tell the boy the order was withdrawn, and then he would ask him, properly, what he wanted.
The cellar door stood unbarred. He had barred it himself, at dusk, with the iron bar from the wall. It was open now, swinging a little on its hinges in the draught from the yard, and the bar was lying on the stone at the foot of the steps.
The kitchen was dark. The fire had been banked. The bench by the oven was empty, and the bread was gone from the cloth on the step, and the boy’s bowl had been rinsed and turned upside down on the rack to drain.
There was a note under the lamp on the kitchen table. Idrin picked it up. It was written in a broad, looping, unpractised hand, in pencil, on the back of a sack-tally.
Boy went home. He asked the gate and the gate let him through, so I suppose it’s sorry now. I am not sorry. He’s a fool to have gone with his arm like that, and I’ve told him so. Eat your bread. P.
Idrin stood in the empty kitchen for a while, holding the note. Then he put it down very carefully on the table, beside the rinsed bowl, and went back out into the dark yard to look at the gate.