Idrin could not sleep, so he read.
He had given up on the Regent’s bed in the first week. It was too narrow for a man who lay awake, and the ticking of the Gatehouse clock came up through the boards of the floor like a second pulse, counting the hours he did not want to count. So he took the lamp to the long table under the window, where the back leaves of the old Register lay open at the place Tallow had marked, and he sat down in his coat with the braid cold on his left sleeve, and he began again at the first of Matrin Coyle’s clauses.
There were thirty-one of them. He had read them all in the first week, as a man reads an inventory of goods he has been told he has inherited. He had marked the Tollgate and set it aside. He had marked the others as Dormant and set them aside too, in his head, as things that could wait for a trigger he could not see. Now he read them slowly, one at a time, and he read the Lessaran sentences in his own voice, low, so that the words would stay in his mouth and not slide off the page.
