The slate was the Hall’s only blackboard, and it had been used for the feast-rolls of the lease-lord’s household, which were still faintly legible under the chalk. Idrin had cleaned it himself, with a rag and a bucket, on the morning after the stiffening. He had not been able to think of a better way to begin a law than by scrubbing away somebody else’s dinner.
He stood at it now with the chalk in his good hand. The Hall was full of the grey light of the afternoon. The packet still lay face down on its square of sacking at the far end of the table, where nobody had yet agreed to touch it, and the Hands sat round the oak in the same places they had kept since the first sitting, as though the benches had been carved to their shape. Harrow with his cord. Tallow with his pencil. Pell at the hearth, with her hands in her lap and her face, which had come back to her, turned toward the window. Gaunt scowling. Korrin with his wrists bare and his right arm resting on the table, flexing the fingers one by one. Ysra by the door. Tamsin, Sella, and Pim, who had shifted his stool to the end of the bench so that he could see the slate.
“We are drafting a charter,” said Idrin. “It is the first instrument the Hold has made in its own name, and I would like it to be correct.”
“Correct for who?” said Gaunt.
“For the Hands who will be bound by it.”
“Then ask the Hands,” said Gaunt, “and not the Lessary lord’s slate.”
Idrin wrote the first line in the Royal Forms, because that was how his hand moved when it was thinking. By the Writ of the Gate, which is the Hold’s first law, and by the consent of its awake Hands, the labour of Ormhold is hereby counted. He read it aloud. He heard the Forms roll out of him like a flag unfolding, and he saw Pell’s mouth twitch at the corner, and he knew that Gaunt was about to object to the word hereby.
“Hereby,” said Gaunt. “What’s hereby? It’s a word for a man who wants to be thanked for a thing he hasn’t done. I object.”
“The Forms require it.”
“The Forms are Lessary’s. They’ve been trying to count us for two hundred years.”
“They have not counted us,” said Harrow, from the window. He did not turn round. “They’ve counted the wall. It’s not the same.”
Idrin crossed out hereby, and under it, in plain words, he wrote the thing he meant. Every awake Hand is counted in shares. A share is a day’s labour, carried by the Hand and entered in the Hold’s book. A Hand shall be paid in grain and in rest, and in no other coin.
“Read that,” said Tallow.
Idrin read it.
Tallow turned the minute-book round on the table, so that his own hand was facing the slate, and read back the clause in his flat quoting voice, every word, then looked up.
“Paid in grain and in rest,” he said. “What’s rest?”
“A day in seven,” said Idrin. “No Hand carries on the seventh day.”
“Who decides what carrying is?”
“The Hand.”
“That’s a range,” said Tallow, with some satisfaction. “I’ll write it as a spread. Eight to ten. Harrow’s stones are not Pell’s loaves, and Pell’s loaves are not Sella’s ledger, and Sella’s ledger is not the goat-pens. A share can’t be a single number, Highness, or somebody will be cheated of it.”
“Then count it a day and let the Hands argue the rest,” said Idrin.
They argued the rest.
Gaunt said a share was a debt. He said so loudly, banging the table with the flat of one hand, and then he said it again more quietly, which was worse. “A share’s a debt,” he said. “A share is what a man owes the thing he’s built, until the thing pays him back. And debt’s a Lessary word. It’s the first word the Crown ever taught us, before it taught us please.”
“A share is a bowl of soup,” said Pell, from the hearth. “That’s what it is in my kitchen. You come in cold and dirty, and I give you a bowl, and you don’t owe me a thing but the bowl back.”
“You’d know.”
“I would. I’ve fed you for a month, you lump. Eat it and call it a share.”
Korrin had not spoken. He was looking at the slate with his flat dark eyes, and his fingers had stopped moving on the table. When he did speak, his voice was short and cold.
“What’s a share worth,” he said, “when the enemy’s on the wall?”
The Hall went quiet.
“Nothing,” said Korrin. “That’s the answer, isn’t it? It’s worth nothing to the man who’s on the wall, because he’s dead before he’s counted. You’re writing a law for the Hands who stay alive long enough to carry things. I’d like it to say so.”
“It says so,” said Ysra, from the door. She did not turn round either. “Read the third line, Tallow.”
Tallow read the third line. It was a short line. A Hand who keeps the wall in the Hold’s need is counted in full, whatever the Hold’s stores may be.
“Oh,” said Korrin, after a long moment. “Well. That’s a different law.”
“It’s the same law,” said Ysra. “It’s just got a second half.”
Harrow turned from the window at last. He had his cord in his hands, and he was winding it round his fingers, knot by knot, the way he did when he was thinking about a footing. “Every night,” he said. “The share should be counted every night. Stones carried, and the day’s walls, and who put the mortar on. Counted, and entered, and not left for a month so that a man forgets which day he worked.”
“Counted every night by whom?” asked Tallow.
“By the Hand.”
“And who checks the Hand’s count?”
Harrow looked at him with an expression of mild surprise. “The stone does,” he said. “It’s heavier when you’ve carried too much. Ask any mason.”
“That’s not a method, Harrow.”
“It’s a method for a mason.”
Idrin wrote counted every night on the slate, and under it, after a moment’s thought, by the Hand, with the Hold’s book as witness. He did not meet Tallow’s eye when he did it. He could feel the clerk’s disapproval gathering behind him like a draught.
“Highness,” said Pim.
The boy had been sitting motionless on the end of the bench, with the carrier’s pole across his knees and his bandaged shin tucked beneath the stool. He was watching the slate, not the Hands. His face was intent and a little cross, as a child’s face goes when he has been told he is too small for something and is about to prove otherwise.
“Yes, Pim?”
“Can a share go to a child?” Pim said. “If the child carries too much?”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Gaunt opened his mouth and then closed it again, as though he had decided against an objection on principle. Pell looked down at her hands. Sella’s pen stopped on the page.
“I carried for nine days before I was counted,” said Pim, in the flat, honest voice he used for things that were simply so. “On the stair. Every day. I didn’t have a share, because nobody had written one. Harrow says I’m owed nine. Tallow’s got it in the book as nine, and that’s not the same as paid. And I’m the smallest, and I carried the biggest block, and it made my palms bleed, and nobody said I was too little to carry it.” He took a breath. “So can it be counted double? For the ones who are small? I’m not asking for me, exactly. I’m asking because I don’t want the next small one to have to be dead before anyone writes it down.”
Idrin stood still at the slate with the chalk in his hand.
He had been raised in rooms where a child’s word was a courtesy, and a child’s wage a joke. He had been told, when he was seven, that the best thing a prince could do with a question from a child was to answer it kindly and forget it by supper. He had not forgotten the boy on the fourth stair. He had not forgotten the stone that had been too heavy, or the bleeding palms, or the way the child had said I’m Pim, mostly as though it were the only true thing he had. He thought, with a clarity that surprised him, that this was the first question he had been asked in the Hold that he could answer without first finding out who would be offended by it.
“Yes,” said Idrin. “It can.”
He wrote it on the slate. The carrier’s day is counted double. Pim, carrier, is owed nine days, entered in full, and paid in grain and rest from this charter’s first share.
“Entered,” said Tallow, with a tremor in his voice that he tried to hide with a cough. “I’ve entered it. Nine. Not a range, Pim. Nine.”
“That’s good,” said Pim.
“It’s the only number I’ve been sure of all week,” said Tallow.
They did not vote that afternoon. The Hands would not be ready to vote, Tallow said, until they had slept on the clauses and found out what they had agreed to in their sleep. So the slate stayed as it was, with the chalk marks running down it in three columns, and the packet stayed at the end of the table with its seals still shut.
Nobody objected to the charter as it stood. Idrin waited for it, out of habit, the way he waited for a candle to gutter before he trusted the room. Gaunt sat with his arms folded and did not say a word. Korrin nodded, once, at the slate, as though it had come up to a standard he had not expected it to reach. Pell hummed under her breath. Harrow went on winding his cord.
It was a new kind of quiet, Idrin thought. It was not the silence of a body that had been told what to think, nor the silence of a clerk who had nothing to add. It was the silence of nine people who had each heard something they did not expect to hear, and had not yet decided whether to forgive the Hall for saying it.
When the Hands had gone up to the Kitchen, and the Hall was dark, Tallow came back alone with the minute-book under his arm. He stood by the slate for a long while in the light of the single lamp, reading the three columns in his own hand. Then he took his pencil and wrote a list down the margin of the next leaf: the names of the Hands who would be asked to vote on the charter at the next candle-clock.
He wrote nine names, one under the other, in his careful square script.
Then, at the foot of the list, after a long pause, he wrote a tenth name, with no seat beside it, and did not explain it to anyone.