The Edict was read in full at the candle-clock, as the Chamber’s rules required, and it took Tallow the better part of a quarter-hour. He read every clause. He read the preamble about the Caul road and the scouts in the reeds, and the sentence about the Sallow mill that Gaunt had asked to have removed and that Tallow had refused to remove, on the grounds that a sentence removed in the Chamber was a sentence the Chamber had to vote on separately. He read the Tithe. He read the choice clause twice, slowly, so that every Hand in the Great Hall could hear the difference between lent and spent, and then he set the paper down on the clerk’s desk and folded his hands and waited, as if the paper might still have something to add.
It did not. The Hall was very quiet. The lamps had been trimmed high for the occasion and the light lay gold on the flagged floor, and in the high chair Idrin Saelmar sat with his left hand under the table and his right hand flat upon the wood, where he could see it.
“The Chamber will hear the Mourner,” he said.
Mourner stood up at the back of the Hall, where the Grave-tender always stood, a little apart from the others and with her hands at her sides. Her Form was a grey, long-jawed face, a copy cast from a dead man’s features with no living model to hold them steady, and…
