The Hearth was the body’s shared memory, and when a Hand testified there, every awake seat heard the testimony as if it had been spoken in its own mouth.
Harrow had never liked it. He had sat in the Hearth’s light once or twice before, in the first winter, when the Chamber had wanted to know which of the Hands had counted the bricks for the north gate and had got the answer wrong, and he had found the experience unpleasant in a way he could never quite describe to Tallow. It was not like speaking aloud. Speaking aloud was a thing a man did with his mouth and his breath and his own stubborn throat. In the Hearth you did not speak. You were heard, all at once, by everyone, in the same instant, and every word you said went down into the body like a stone into a well, and there was no way of getting it back up again.
He sat on the stone bench in the arch of the Great Hall with the Hearth’s light lying across his hands. It was not a fire. It was a greyish glow that came up from the floor between the casks, very faint, as if the flagstones had been warmed from below by something that was not quite a flame. Tallow sat at the treaty table with the minutes open. Velvet sat by the hearth, not at her own bench, with her hands in her lap. Korrin sat at…
