Idrin came down the Kitchen passage the next morning with a question he had rehearsed in Royal Forms, and Pell was waiting for him at the pantry door with her arms folded across the flour.
He had rehearsed it well. He had been up half the night over it, sitting on the edge of his bed with the candle guttering and the Warden’s box open beside him and his sister’s cipher sheet folded on top of the box. He had found the right order for the clauses. He had found the right tone for the Watch’s breach, which was the tone of a prince who regrets a disturbance in his own household and intends to see it corrected by the proper officers. He had even found a sentence about the importance of the Hearth to the Hold’s continued self-government, which he had thought, in the small hours, was rather fine.
Pell was standing in front of the pantry door with her chin up. She had been a cook in the Hold for two years, and she had called him boy for every one of them, when she was fond of him, and Warden when she was cross, and Idrin once, when she had thought he was about to fall down the Undercroft stair. She had never once called him anything else.
