The first sitting of Idrin’s Regency was given over, from the candle-clock to the second bell, to a quarrel about firewood.
He had expected something grander. He had sat through the Warden’s sittings all autumn with the sense of a man rehearsing for a larger play, and he had assumed, in his private way, that a Regent’s first session would concern the weft, or the Lessaran letters, or the question of whether a body with nine seats could count itself a kingdom. Instead Gaunt wanted the forge’s allowance raised. The north-gate stove wanted it lowered, because the north gate was the coldest post in the Hold and the stove had been promised a share in the spring. Korrin wanted the Regent’s own wood stacked by the Hard Hands, because the Regent was, in Korrin’s view, the least useful pair of hands in the Hold and should at least keep a pile of them warm.
Idrin listened to all of it. Then he took the chair of state, which was not comfortable, and reached for a sheet of the Chamber’s paper, and began to draft a reply.
He did it out of habit. He would think afterwards that it was the Lessaran Court in him, the sort of training that could not write three lines of a decision without the Forms rising up in the hand like water in a cistern. The sentences came out in the old shape, the bows and the careful subordinations, as if a crowd of tutors…
