The candle-clock in the Great Hall had been burning since before the Hold had a name, and in all that time nobody had ever wound it. Tallow noticed this at the start of the sitting, when the wax had burned down to the third ring and the Chamber had not yet agreed that it had started. He wrote the observation in the margin of his board, then rubbed it out, because a minute that records a clock is a minute that admits the clock has an opinion.
The Hands took their places in the order they had arrived in the Hold, which was not the order anyone would have chosen. Harrow sat nearest the window so that he could count the wall while he listened to it. Korrin took the chair by the door and turned it so that his back was to the wall and his eyes were on the stair. Gaunt sat on the bench instead of the chair, because he had said at breakfast that the chairs were a Lessary idea and he would not sit on a Lessary idea before noon. Ysra stood, which was her own idea. Pell sat with her hands in her apron and a pan of bread beside her on the table, in case the Chamber required feeding.
Idrin presided from the chair that Pell had carried up from the Kitchen. It had one leg shorter than the others, and he had been given a folded slate to put under the short leg, which he had done with the grave dignity of a prince who has been told the floor is uneven. He cleared his throat in the Royal manner. Tallow, who had heard the Royal manner rehearsed every night for a month in the gatehouse, braced himself for a Form.
“We are assembled,” Idrin said, “to ratify the first instrument of the Hold’s law. The Charter of Shares is before us. We will consider each share in turn, and the Chamber will decide what it costs.”
“Cost first,” said Gaunt from the bench. “The Charter says shares. A share is a debt, and a debt is a Lessary word. Pay it in iron.”
“Pay it in bread,” said Pell.
“Pay it in stone,” said Harrow, without turning from the window.
“Pay it in what the Chamber agrees,” said Tallow, who had been waiting to say something of the kind since the candles were lit. He lifted the Charter’s first page and read the clause aloud, which was the only way he knew to stop an argument from becoming a fight. “Each awake Hand shall hold one labour-share for each day it is carried, paid in such goods as the Chamber sets. The goods are not named. The Chamber sets them. In plain words, a labour-share is a day’s keep owed to a Hand for a day’s carrying, and the Chamber decides what that keep is made of. I have several readings for the word such, and the widest reading includes gravel.”
Gaunt laughed, which surprised everyone including Gaunt. “Gravel,” he said. “Make it gravel.”
Idrin put his scarred left hand flat on the table and looked at it for a moment, the way he looked at things he did not yet understand. Tallow had seen him do it in the gatehouse and at the Warden’s dinner. The scar had pulled white and tight across the knuckles since the burn was dressed, and it made the hand look like a second, older hand that had been lent to him for the occasion.
“The Charter’s purpose is to make each Hand’s labour visible,” Idrin said. “Its price is a matter for the Chamber. I ask the Chamber to decide the price by vote.”
They voted. It was a simple thing, a show of hands and a count. Harrow counted aloud, as he always did, and when he reached five for bread and four for iron he stopped, looked at the count again, and said four for iron was too few to be a body’s opinion, and so the matter was carried for bread by five voices to four.
Idrin, who had argued for neither, looked up from the table with the expression of a man who had been out-voted by his own cook. Pell, who had not stopped looking at the bread, looked back at him with the mild satisfaction of a woman who has been right about an oven for forty years.
“The Warden’s view,” Idrin said carefully, “was that the price should be set by a principle.”
“The Warden’s view was that he had no view,” Pell said. “The principle is bread, boy. It has always been bread.”
Tallow recorded the vote in the Register of Tithe, which he had opened on the table that morning. The Register of Tithe was a ledger he had bound himself out of the Gatehouse’s spare paper, and it had two columns on its first page that he had ruled with a straight edge and an ink he had made from soot and gum. The left column was headed days carried. The right column was headed days rested. He wrote each Hand’s name at the top of a line, then wrote the number of days each Hand had carried in the past week, then wrote, beside each number, the range within which he thought the number was true. He was careful about the range. A count with no range was a claim, and a claim could be disputed by anyone with a stick.
“You have given Harrow a range of two,” Gaunt said, leaning over the table to see.
“Harrow counted the days aloud,” Tallow said. “A count aloud is accurate to one. Harrow has miscounted once, in the week of the north wall, and the Register remembers it. The range is two because Harrow was on the wall in the rain.”
“Harrow was not on the wall in the rain,” Harrow said.
“Then the range is one,” said Tallow, and changed it.
Tallow had begun the first page that morning with the names, and he had found the names the hardest part. Each Hand had come to the Hold by a different road and had arrived with a different kind of silence. Sella’s silence was tidy, each sentence set down like a bone in a splint. Korrin’s was a closed fist. Harrow’s was a count that never quite stopped. Pim’s was no silence at all, because he had talked from the moment he woke, and was still talking now, under his breath, to nobody in particular, about the stair. Tallow wrote each name in the Register of Tithe in the same small hand, and beside each he put the days carried in the week before the Charter, which was none, because the Charter had not yet existed. He therefore gave every Hand a range of nought to seven, and was sorry for it.
The first share day would fall at the next full candle-clock. Until then the Hands were to be paid in promises, and promises were the one currency that required no grain. Idrin asked for the Chamber’s objections to the Charter as a whole. Gaunt objected, in a long and thorough speech, that the Charter had been written in a Royal hand and that the Royal hand dotted its i’s with a tiny crown. Korrin objected that the Charter gave shares to Hands who had never been in a fight. Ysra objected that the Charter had not yet counted the stairs. Sella objected by saying that she would need to see each Hand’s ribs before she agreed to anything that involved carrying. Tamsin said nothing, but she looked at each objector in turn as if she were sorry for them, and the goats in the pens outside made a noise that Tallow recorded, with a dagger mark, as an abstention.
When the room had gone quiet, Tallow saw the door.
It was a plain oak door, and it had been shut since morning. Now a fresh black mark ran across its lower panel, drawn in charcoal in thick, furious strokes. It was a letter. It was in fact three letters and a long tail, a sentence set down by someone who did not trust the Chamber to read a word in a clean hand. Tallow stood, crossed the room, and read it aloud with a clerk’s care.
It was Gaunt’s objection to the bread, and it ran to four paragraphs. The first paragraph called the vote a conspiracy of ovens. The second said the Hands had been given shares without a single nail in them. The third was the most rude thing Tallow had ever read in a public place, and he read it all the same, because the Register required each objection to be recorded in full, and it did not make an exception for insults. The fourth paragraph, which was short, said that the Hold had no reason to pay any Hand in bread who did not also agree to carry something heavy.
Tallow copied the whole of it into the Register of Tithe, word for word, under the heading First objection of a Hand, kept in full. Then he sat down and read the paragraph again, and then he looked at Idrin, who had come to stand beside him and was reading it too, with the attentive face of a prince who has been given an unexpected lesson.
“The middle paragraph is correct,” Idrin said at last, quietly. “I do not agree with the rest of it.”
“You agree with the middle paragraph,” Tallow said, “which is the one about the nails.”
“Yes,” said Idrin. “Put that in the minutes, Clerk. Put it in as my own.”
Tallow wrote it. The first page of the Register of Tithe closed then, in the late light, with its two columns full and its heading in soot-black ink, and at the foot of the right-hand column there was a third column that Tallow had not ruled. It had no heading. He had not drawn it, and when he tried to write a word at its head he found the pen would not make a mark.
“What is that column for?” he asked the room.
For a moment nothing answered. Then, from somewhere beneath the Hall’s floor, came a low sound, the sound of a stone settling into a bed it had been waiting a long time to find. Every Hand in the room heard it. Pell put down her spoon. Harrow stopped counting. Ysra went to the door and listened for the stair.
Tallow wrote that down too.