Idrin drafted the Charter of Recovery in plain sentences, because the Seal would not let him write it any other way, and by the third attempt he had come to think that the Seal had been right.
He sat at the clerk’s table in the Gatehouse with the lamp at his left elbow, where he could see it without turning his head, and the Chamber’s paper flat under his right hand, and the pen in his right fingers, and he wrote. He did not begin with a preamble. A preamble was a Royal Form that had learned to sit down, and his Forms had all gone to sleep. He began with the thing itself, in the small upright hand that Pell had praised and that Tallow had come to read as a kind of confession.
The Chamberlain of the Record is Shelved by the Edict of the Forms’ Lending. Her Form was Spent, not Lent, at her own asking. Her Hand is asleep in a chair in the receiving-hall, and has been asleep since the candle-clock of the Edict.
He read it over. It was true. It was a fact in plain words, and a fact could not be argued with, because it had already happened, and the Chamber could only decide what to do about it.
