Now that he was Crowned, Idrin could make a Perpetual Charter, and he sat down to draft one the morning after the vault, with the mould still cooling in the Undercroft and Velvet’s tea still too sweet on the receiving-hall table.
The Seal had made the draft easier in one way and harder in every other. It had taken his Forms, so that he had to write each clause in the plain upright hand Pell had praised. It had taken, as Sella said, the sleep out of his arm, so that his right hand shook a little when he dipped the pen and steadied when he did not think about it. But it had also made him understand, for the first time in his life, that a Crowned prince was the only man in the Hold who could write a line that would still be true when the Hold had forgotten who wrote it. He did not know whether that was a gift. He had begun to suspect it was a debt.
He wrote the first clause plainly, because he had made himself a rule that every clause would begin with a fact.
The Hold and its March stand as the Crown’s, for as long as the Crown stands.
