The letter came up from Sallowmere in the carrier’s pouch on a grey morning with the rain still waiting in the sky. It was sealed with a plain wax wafer and no crest, and the carrier who brought it had not been able to say who had given it to him, only that it had been handed across a counter at a posting-house on the Lessary Road by a woman in a dark cloak who had paid the fare in silver and had not waited for change.
Tallow took it to the clerk’s table in the Gatehouse and laid it flat under the lamp, and looked at it a while before he broke the wafer. He knew the hand. He would have known it in the dark. It was small and dry and exact, the hand of a woman who had been taught to write by a tutor who thought ink was a kind of confession, and it had not changed since the summer she came up the Lessary Road under a false name and asked him, very politely, to show her the last clauses of the Hold’s Register.
The body of the letter was ordinary. It spoke of the weather at Sallowmere, which was raw, and of the price of Lessaran lamp-oil, which had gone up by a sixth since the frost, and of a cousin’s wedding in the Assembly’s lower chamber that nobody in the Hold had been asked to attend. It asked after the Regent’s health in…
