Idrin had a stroke through the word “name” on his own Petition, and he did not remember making it.
He knew the fact. He had seen the mark on the Hold’s copy with his own eyes, in the Great Hall, in the fog-light, and Tallow had written it down in the Ink with the time beside it, and it was there on the paper now in a line as clean as a ruled margin. He knew that the stroke was his. He knew that the pen had been in his fist for the whole of the reading, and that his knuckles had gone white, and that the nib had come down at the end of a long pale moment and had drawn itself across the page like a blade across a throat. He could reconstruct it, as a clerk reconstructs a figure from the columns on either side.
What he did not have was the feeling. He had no memory of deciding. He had no memory of the moment when his hand had moved from holding the pen above the paper to striking the one word in the Petition that the Hold had written with its own name in the middle of it. He had only the mark, and the knowledge that it had been made by him, and a faint sick sense, like the aftertaste of a bad wine, that something had been taken out of him in the making of it.
