The walk back was longer than the walk out, because nobody wanted to be the first to reach the crest.
Tallow noticed it on the lake road before they had gone a mile. They had set off in a loose file behind the Warden, who walked at the front with his coat over his arm and his bare feet cased in a pair of borrowed boots that Ysra had found in the Mason’s box at the top of the stair. Brannoc walked just behind him. Then came Sella, and then Ysra, and then Tallow himself, with the slate under one arm and the census roll under the other and the pencil in his fist. Nobody spoke for some time. The shingle gave way to the old grey road, and the road to the rocks, and the rocks to the first of the bare slopes, and at every stage the file seemed to slow a little more, as though each of them were waiting for someone else to set the pace toward the high ground.
So Tallow wrote the minutes as they climbed.
He wrote them on the slate, in pencil, with the wet cloth tied round the edge to keep the chalk from running. He had written the minutes in a great many difficult places in two years, on the Chamber’s long table and on the Mason’s bench and once, memorably, on the back of a goat-cart in the rain. He had never written them on a slope that went…
