Pell had come up to the Gatehouse with the Kitchen’s bread for the Chamber’s clerks, which was a duty she had long since stopped pretending was anybody else’s, and she stayed because the Regent was trying to write a custom for the gate-store and could not get the first sentence down. She could see him through the open door from the stair. He sat at the clerk’s table with the lamp at his elbow and a fresh leaf of the Chamber’s paper flat under his right hand, and every few moments he drew breath, and every time he drew it he began to speak aloud, very low, in the old cadence.
“We find the gate-store improperly placed,” he said, and the Form came out whole for the first few words, as a horse comes out of a stall with a good deal of confidence and no clear idea of the road. “We find that the Chancery’s salt—”
The pen stopped. It was in the middle of the word salt, on the l, and the ink spread out from the nib in a small dark bloom and stayed there. Pell watched him try to finish the letter. His jaw worked. His right hand lifted the pen an inch, and then set it down again on the bloom, very carefully, as if he were setting a broken thing down on a table.
