The Chamber wanted a law, and the Warden was asked to write it, which was the one thing Idrin had been trying all season to avoid.
He sat at the drafting table in the Great Hall’s side room, a narrow chamber with a single window that looked out over the Mason’s Yard, and he had a fresh sheet of the Chancery’s paper in front of him that Tallow had brought up from the granary store, and a pen that Gaunt had made for him in the spring, with a nib of Forge-steel that did not scratch. Tallow sat on his left with the minute-book open. Harrow sat on his right, with a stone in his lap that he had not yet begun to dress and a look on his face of careful, unsettled attention, like a man who has been asked to sign a building contract without seeing the foundations.
Idrin dipped the pen. He wrote the heading of the sheet, which was Articles of the Hearth, in the plain Hold hand he had been using since the first winter. He looked at it for a while. Then, out of habit, because it was what a Warden had always done with a sheet of paper, he began a second line in the Forms’ grammar, the long polished sentences of the Lessary Court with their careful balance of clauses and their pretty little bows at the end. Whereas the Hold has, by the grace of its Warden, been pleased to admit—
