The Edict of Labour came up the Kitchen stair at noon on a board, carried by two of the Watch and a clerk who was afraid of the steam. Pell took it off them at the top step and read it standing, with a wooden spoon in her other hand and flour on her thumb, because she had been told it was coming and had decided to be insulted before she saw it.
She was not disappointed. The Edict was four lines long, in Tallow’s clean capitals, and it said that every Hand awake in the Hold should labour on the granary’s repairs and on the Lantern Ford road, with its stone and its ditches, before the harvest came in. It was the Regent’s first Edict. He had said so at the morning table, in a voice he had tried very hard to keep plain, and Pell had said that she would believe it when she saw him lift a sack.
“A cook cannot be bound to a granary,” she said to the clerk, who had put the board down on the flagstones and was backing toward the door. “A cook is bound to a kitchen. It says so in the Charter, I’ll wager, in the same line where it says a Hand gets bread at the Turn.”
