Velvet had argued for the Petition since the reading, and it had been the hardest year of her life, because every plain sentence she spoke was a door she had to open by herself.
She had never been good at opening doors. She had always been better at standing in them. A Chamberlain stood in the door and smiled at the people who came through it, and told each of them that the room behind her had been waiting a very long time for their particular virtues, and then she stepped aside so they could go in. That was the whole of the trade. It did not require her to say what the room was for, or who the room belonged to, or whether any of the people going in would ever be allowed to come out again with their own names intact.
Now she had to say all of those things, and she could not find the smile to hide behind.
“The Hands are the Hold’s household,” she said, at the second sitting on the Petition, standing at the foot of the casks with her hands at her sides. “A household has a right to be counted by its own names. That is not a Lessaran clause. It is what a family does at the table, when it is hungry and somebody is missing. You call the names. You do not wait for a clerk to call them for you.”
