The Chamber voted on the Charter of Hands with all nine seats, and it did so in the grey light of the next morning, with the shutters open and the wind coming off the marsh and the Hold’s whole household crowding the Great Hall’s arch to listen.
Idrin had not slept. He had sat up in the Hall’s cold alcove with the Charter under his hand and the lamp burning low beside him, and he had watched the Seal’s mark on his left arm climb in the dark. It had reached his elbow in the night. By the time the candle-clock’s first ring came round it had touched the crook of his shoulder, a faint pale heat under the cloth that moved when he moved, and he had kept his arm steady and counted the seconds until the Chamber sat down.
Harrow voted first, because he always did when he had stones in his hands. He stood with a stone in each fist and said yes, and then, as he set the stones down on the table, he asked what the strike was for. Nobody answered him. He nodded slowly, as though he had been expecting the silence, and then said, quite unexpectedly, that the wall needed the rubble taken out of its footings, and that a Charter was only a wall with a voice in it.
