The Chamber sat for the first time since the Crossing on the twenty-seventh day of the shut gate, and Tallow was in the Great Hall before the candles were lit. A clerk who arrives after the Hands have begun to argue has already lost the first sentence of every argument, and he had lost enough of those.
He laid the minutes book square on the table. He set the ink-pot on the left and the pen on the right, and he wiped a dry ring from the wood with his cuff. The casks stood in their half-circle at the back of the Hall. The benches were still too short for the Hands who sat on them. The Warden’s chair stood at the head of the casks, where the prince had put it and where it had stayed.
Beside the chair lay Lessary’s Writ of Inventory, unsealed, its corners curling as if it had been left out in the damp. Nobody had moved it. Idrin had read it twice and then rested one hand on top of it, as a man keeps his hat on a table when there is a wind in the room. A Writ of Inventory, Tallow had told the Hands more than once, was a Crown list of what a Lessaran court could count as owned, and the Hold was on it now under a heading that did not say citizen.
