The grey shape came to the Great Hall’s door at first light, and stopped on the threshold, where the prince was standing with a lamp in his hand because he had heard the Watch’s report and did not mean to be caught asleep in his own house.
Idrin had not slept. He had sat on the bench in the Hall’s arch with his back to the cold stone and the lamp on the flags beside him, and he had listened to the Mound’s singing come up over the wall in the wind, and he had tried, without success, to write a sentence in the Forms’ grammar that would explain to Tallow why the Chamber was going to feed a face. He had got as far as Whereas the Hold has an interest in the continuance of, and had looked at the word continuance for a long while, and had crossed it out.
Now the shape was on the threshold, and it was looking at him.
It had the captain’s face. It had come apart from the wax and been stitched back together in the night, and the half of it that was steady had the jaw and the scar at the lip and the grey at the temples, the whole careful weight of a man who had been a Lessaran soldier for thirty years and had never once been asked to say what he was for. The other half was a smooth grey plane where the wax had not yet…
