The Chamber sat in mourning in the early summer, with the candles lit at every cask and the Lowgate headcount read out before the agenda, as the Warden had asked it to be read.
Velvet had never heard the count read aloud before. She had heard the Hold’s ledgers read in the receiving hall, in the flat voice of Tallow reciting figures for the Lessaran commission, and she had admired his precision the way she admired a well-cut coat, from a distance and without any intention of wearing it. The headcount was different. Tallow read it in a voice that was not flat at all, and when he came to the end of the first column, where the names of the Lowgate dead stood in their small square hand, he stopped, and the room waited for him to go on.
A child of six, Goda’s youngest. He read the words exactly as they were written, and then he read the blank line beneath them, and said quietly that the line had no name on it, and that the bonesetter had asked the Chamber to leave it so.
The envoy was still lodged in the Hold. He sat at the back of the Hall, on a bench beside his clerk, with the grey-coated aide standing behind him against the wall. He had been waiting for the first treaty cart to cross the ford, and the first cart had crossed in the night, and he had not yet been told he might…
