The Regent’s room in the Gatehouse had been a clerk’s room once, and it still smelled of it. There was a long table under the window, scarred with the rings of a hundred inkpots, and a wall of shelves that held the Hold’s minutes in their leather covers, one year to a cover, the earliest so brittle they had to be turned with a feather. There was a bed in the corner that no one had made since the autumn. There was a chair with a cushion that Velvet had sent up in the first week of the Regency, and which Idrin had not sat in once, because it was too soft for a man who had to write.
He wrote at the table, on the bare wood, in the light of a single lamp.
It was past midnight. The Gatehouse was quiet. Somewhere below him, down the stair, Korrin was at the bar with his two Hard Hands, and Ysra was on the wall counting the lanterns in Lowgate one by one as they went out, and Tallow was in the back leaves with his pencil, adding a line to the Tollgate’s margin each time the clause woke a little more. Idrin could hear none of them. He could only hear the pen, and the paper, and the slow tick of the lamp’s wick as the oil drew up through it.
