The first treaty carts had crossed the Sallow Ford, and the Ferryman had carried every one of them without a single silver piece changing hands, and so on the last day of the treaty Tallow laid the year’s ledger out on the table for the signing.
He laid it out the way he had laid out every ledger since the first winter, square to the edge of the wood, with the ink-pot on the left and the pen on the right and the blotter set just so. He set the three counts at the top, in his small upright hand, with the sums ruled beneath them. He set the royal class under the counts, and the memory tally under the class, and the treasury at the foot of the page, where the Lessarans always looked first. It was a plain page. He had made it plain on purpose, because a treaty signed over a plain page was harder to argue with afterwards.
The passage toll stood at the head of the treasury column.
It was reckoned in shares, the Hold’s own way, and it came, in the Kitchen’s book, to sixty sacks’ worth of grain. Tallow had entered it that morning as a Lessaran toll paid in the Hold’s own granary, which it was not, quite, and he had noted the difference in the margin in the Ink, in a small clear hand that did not hurry. The Ink had taken the figure without fuss. It had never once in…
