The Charter’s Tithe was one Form lent for one season, and the Chamber had chosen the Kitchen’s spare, because the Feed family had two Hands, the cook and Tamsin, and Tamsin was Quiet in the Goat Pens and could not be lent a Form she could not wear.
Pell heard the choice read out at the Turn. She had been up since before the bread and had come up the Chamber stair with flour on her forearms and her apron tied wrong, and she had stood at the back of the Hall while the clerk read the Tithe’s clause in the Ink’s flat grammar, and she had not said a word until the clerk got to the bit about the cook’s spare. Then she had said, quite loudly, that the Chamber had better not expect her to carry it up the stairs herself, because her back was not what it had been in the builder lines.
Nobody had laughed. Idrin had looked at her across the table with a face she did not like at all, and she had gone back down the stairs without waiting for the rest of the minute.
Now she stood in the Kitchen with the linen in her hands.
