The feeding charge was recorded in the granary book on the morning after the vote, and by noon the lodgers had heard of it, and by the middle of the afternoon Lowgate had decided to come up the Great Hall’s steps with its own bread.
Idrin saw them from the Chamber window. He had been trying to write a letter to the Chancery in the plain grammar, one sentence at a time, and had got no further than the salutation, which was a thing he had never once in his life been unable to manage. He put the pen down. He went to the window, and he saw a line of women and men coming up the Hall’s long approach from the lower gate, in ones and twos, carrying baskets and sacks and covered trays against their hips, with the sunlight on their faces and their shoulders very straight.
At the head of the line, with a basket of loaves in both arms, was Osk.
He had been to the Hall once already that week. He had stood in the doorway in the cold and refused the Chamber’s feeding charge in two sentences, and then had gone away again without waiting to be answered. Idrin had thought that was the end of it. He had been wrong, and he had not, until he saw the basket, understood how wrong.
