The study was the smallest room in the Regent’s wing, and Idrin had chosen it for that reason. It had a window the width of a man’s arm, a table that had come up the Lessary Road in a Chancery cart and had been scarred by three winters of ink, a single chair, and a shelf of minute-books that nobody else in the Hold could read in the dark. He sat at the table late on the night of the Ballot with the lamp at his elbow and the Harvest Ballot’s clause open under his good hand, and he read it through twice, slowly, as he had once read a letter from his brother with the seal still warm.
It was a very good clause. He could see that. Tallow had put the stress in the right places, and had left out the Royal Forms that a lesser clerk would have used to dress a sentence up, and had left in the one phrase in it that a Lessaran would be unable to read without a small, uncomfortable jolt of recognition. The Crown’s ration decree is superseded, and not struck. The Crown had never once in its life allowed a decree to die. It had only allowed them to be buried under newer decrees, one on top of the other, until the Hold’s bread was being cut by a clause that had been written two centuries before the bread was baked.
