The Chamber voted on the two marsh-men at the candle-clock, on the seventh day after the sitting on casks, and it voted in the cellar because nobody had yet found a better place to be frightened in. The two men were sitting on the bottom step of the stair, with their backs against the wall and their wrists bound with rope, and they were watching the Chamber as a dog watches men at a table. One was the ferryman’s brother, a lean silent man with a scar across his cheek. The other was a reed-cutter with his left leg bound in a splint of oak that Pell had made for him. He had a face like a boiled bone and a habit of muttering the names of the drowned under his breath, and nobody had yet asked him to stop.
Tallow had the minutes on his knee. He had written the question at the top of the leaf, in capitals, and under it he had drawn a neat box for each Hand, in the order of their seats. He read the question aloud before the count began, in his dry precise way, because a vote that was not read aloud could be argued afterward.
“Are the two men on the stair prisoners of the Hold,” said Tallow, “or guests of the Hold? A guest is received under the Hold’s law. A prisoner is held against his will. The Chamber decides by the awake voices, weighted by labour-share. The rule for counting was settled on the second morning, in the margin, with a caveat.” He cleared his throat. “Each Hand will now say its answer. Prisoner or guest. Abstention is recorded as abstention.”
“Prisoners,” said Korrin, at once.
“Prisoners,” said Gaunt, a beat later, with an air of having objected in advance to whatever anyone else might say.
“Guests,” said Pell. She had the bread-cloth in her lap and her knife in her hand, and she did not raise her eyes from the cloth.
“Guests,” said Harrow, from his mason’s block, without raising his eyes from the flags. “It’s a fair number of stones to be holding men with.”
Tallow wrote each answer in its box. He did not comment. When he came to the box for himself, he paused, with the pencil lifted, and read aloud, in the same flat voice, “The Charter of the Hold does not name the clerk. The clerk therefore abstains, on the Charter’s silence, and records the abstention in the margin.” He wrote it. He kept his head down.
Ysra was at the foot of the stair, with her back to the wall and her eyes on the steps. She had not sat for the whole of the sitting. When Tallow read her name, she did not turn her head. She stood silent for a moment, counting something in her own head, and then she said, in her flat unhappy voice, “Prisoners.”
Then she walked three paces to the cellar door, and stood there with her shoulder against the frame, looking out at the yard and the grey afternoon beyond it, as though she had voted by leaving the room and would prefer not to be asked again.
“Prisoners,” said Tallow, writing. “The Watch, by the door.”
He stopped, and looked at the page, and then looked up with a faint frown.
“That’s three for prisoners,” he said. “Korrin, Gaunt, and the Watch. Three for guests. Pell and Harrow.” He lifted his pencil. “And the Hold has seven awake, if you count the one that’s only just come up, and I’ve not heard its answer yet. But I can’t count it. It isn’t in the cellar.”
“Where is it?” asked Idrin.
“In the goat-pens,” said Tallow. “Above the yard. I can hear it singing.”
Idrin heard it then. He had not noticed the sound until the clerk named it. It came down through the cellar ceiling and the yard above, faint and far and low, the sound of a woman’s voice raised in an old wordless tune, very soft, as a person sings to an animal that has been frightened in the night. It did not stop. It went on and on, and it had a quality of tenderness that made the back of his neck prickle.
“That’s a Hand,” said Harrow quietly, from his block. He had lifted his head at last. He was looking up at the ceiling as though he could see through it. “A herder’s voice. It’s a seat that’s been empty since the first morning. The goats have been calling for it, and it’s come.”
“Can it vote?”
“It can say what it wants,” said Tallow, “and I’d record it. But it’s not in the room, and the rule for counting says in the room, and I wrote that rule myself, and I’m not going to unwrite it for a goat.”
The room was silent. Idrin could feel the vote coming to him the way one feels a cold draught come under a door: from the front, low and steady, and with no obvious source. Three for prisoners. Three for guests. A clerk who would not decide and a watch who had gone to stand at the door. And a voice in the goat-pens, singing, which the Hold could not yet count and would not let itself ignore.
“Then the Hold’s voice must break it,” said Idrin.
“You’re not the Hold’s voice,” said Tallow, quite gently. “You’re the prince. The prince can’t break a tie in the Chamber, Highness. A tie is a Chamber’s matter, and the Chamber must go to the Writ, or to a Charter, or to the stone.”
“The Writ is a Pretender’s instrument.”
“It is,” said Tallow. “I’m sorry for it.” He lowered the pencil. “It’s the only one there is.”
Idrin looked at the two men on the stair. The ferryman’s brother had turned his head and was watching the prince with a blank, fixed, unreadable attention. The reed-cutter had stopped muttering. His eyes were closed, and his lips were still.
Idrin stood up.
He had decided, in the night, that he would not do it. He had decided it again at the candle-clock, and again while Tallow read the names. He had decided, in the cellar, after the thing with the boy, that he would not decide anything for anyone again without asking them first. He thought of Pell’s face in the kitchen and Harrow’s voice on the wall, and of the reeve saying you’re a fool, but you’ve been taught to aim. He thought of the men on the causeway.
He did not ask. He did not know how. There was no one in the cellar who could tell him what to do that did not require him to be the one who did it.
He spoke the Writ.
He used the clear dry voice of the Chancery court, every word laid down separately on the cold air. He did not meet the eyes of the men on the stair. He looked at the lamp.
“We find the matter of the two men on the stair unsettled by the Chamber’s count,” said Idrin. “We decline to leave them held without a term. The site of this Writ is the cellar, and no other. They are guests of the Hold, under the Hold’s word, until the Hold’s word is broken.”
He stopped. He felt the Writ go out of him. It went like breath from the lungs, like the sound of a bell struck in a stone room, and it rang through the cellar and along the floor and up into the walls, and in the walls it found the weft and held. He felt it take hold. He felt the cold touch of the Register on his mind, quick and exact, as a clerk’s fingers close on a coin.
Then he felt the other thing.
It was a small thing. It was a tune. He had been humming it under his breath for weeks, without knowing he did it, as a man hums a song his mother sang while she was combing his hair. It was the lullaby: the first bar, and the second, and the falling phrase that came after, and the bedtime words that had always been at the end of it. He reached for the words now, to hum them, to hold on to them, and found that there was nothing there at all. There was the shape of a tune, and the gap where the rest should be, like a missing stair in the dark.
He sat down heavily on the cask. The wood creaked under him.
“Highness?” said Tallow sharply.
“I’m all right.”
“You’re not. You’ve gone white.” Tallow was writing fast, his pencil scratching across the page. “The Writ’s taken something. I felt the Register take it. I’ll enter it as the Register enters everything, with no name beside it. What was it?”
“A lullaby,” said Idrin. He was surprised to hear how calm his voice sounded. “My mother’s.”
Tallow stopped writing. He looked up, and his face was for once entirely without its usual range. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry for that.”
Pell had put down her knife. She sat with the bread-cloth in her lap and her hands folded on it, and she did not say anything, but her eyes had gone soft and bright, and her mouth had set in a line that Idrin did not like at all.
Above them, in the goat-pens, the woman’s voice had stopped singing. There was a short silence. Then, through the ceiling and the yard and the grey air, Idrin heard a single goat bleat, long and miserable, and then another, and then the whole flock began to call. They called in a rising chorus, high and piteous, and at the top of the chorus, very faint and wrong, came a tune. It was almost the one he had lost. It had the same first bar and the same falling phrase. But the words at the end had changed, and the bedtime had turned into something else, a count, or a warning, or a name called across a field.
He put his hands over his face.
Through the shared sight of the weft, which he had felt once or twice before but never clearly, he saw a woman in the goat-pens. She had a shepherd’s apron tied over a dark dress, and her hair was pinned up under a grey kerchief. She was standing among the animals with her arms at her sides, and she was looking up at the sky through the open gate of the pen. She did not seem to have been asleep. She looked, for a moment, like a woman who has just been asked a question she did not expect and has not yet decided how to answer.
When Idrin took his hands away from his face, Tallow was counting the votes again, very slowly, with the pencil moving from box to box.
“Three to three,” said Tallow at last. “The Writ has settled the men’s status, Highness, but the vote itself is still a tie. The Writ names the site and the term. It doesn’t name the vote. I’ve written it that way.” He looked at the page, and then at the prince, and then at the cellar stair where the two men sat with their eyes on him. “And I’ve counted my own abstention twice, and both times I came out the same, which is one abstention that nobody in this Hold can explain.”