Pell had decided that a Warden must eat with his Chamber, and she had decided it in the way she decided everything, which was by putting the food on the table before anyone could object. Idrin came into the Great Hall at dusk to find a long board set end to end across the trestles, with a cloth on it that had once been a curtain and a row of candles in cracked saucers down the middle. There was bread. There was a pot of barley with a wooden spoon standing up in it like a flag. There were two onions, cut in quarters, and a joint of mutton that had been roasted slowly over the Kitchen fire since noon and smelled, Idrin thought, of something stolen.
He had prepared for the evening in the Royal manner. He had written out a seating order on the back of a Charter draft. He had practised a toast in the mirror of a basin of water, and he had decided that the Warden’s address would be brief, courteous and in plain words, because the Hands had already told him, through the minutes, that they would not sit still for anything else.
He stood at the head of the table with the seating order in his good hand, and the Hands sat wherever they liked.
Gaunt took the bench nearest the fire and kept his back to the board. Harrow took the place by the window, where the light fell on the stones he could count through the glass. Korrin sat with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door, as he always did, and Pell, who had insisted on being fed as well as feeding, put herself at the far end, where she could reach the pot. Tallow sat between the Warden’s chair and the door, with his board on his knee, so that he could minute the dinner. Sella took the stool. Tamsin sat on the floor, against the wall, with a bowl in her lap. Pim, who had been sitting on the top of the table until Pell removed him, had been moved to a bench at the foot, where he could see the mutton.
Ysra was the last to come in. She looked down the table, saw that every seat with a view of the stair had been taken, and came to the one place left, at the end, facing the door. She sat in it with her back straight and her hands folded and her eyes on the table.
“The Warden will say a few words,” said Idrin.
“Say the words quickly,” said Pell. “They are going cold.”
He lifted his cup. The cup was tin, with a dent near the rim where Gaunt had used it as a hammer, and he had filled it with the Hold’s own ale, which was thin and bitter and had been brewed by Pell from the last of the spring barley against her better judgement. He cleared his throat.
“We are the Chamber of Hands,” he said. “We sit here as the first body of the Hold to take bread together in the open. I propose that we drink to the Hold’s law, to the Charter of Shares, and to the—”
“Forge,” said Gaunt, lifting his own cup without waiting. “To the forge, which will last longer than this speech.”
“To the stones,” said Harrow, and then, because he could not help it, he began counting the candles along the table under his breath. “One. Two. Eleven. Twelve. The Warden is on twelve.”
“I was not finished.”
“You were on twelve,” said Harrow, and drank.
Idrin looked down at the seating order. Nobody had followed it. The seats had gone the way the Hands wanted them, and the order in his hand had become, in the space of a minute, a list of names that had nowhere to go. He folded it. He put it in his pocket. He felt a small, hot sting in his face that he recognised as the Royal manner trying to recover itself and failing, and he felt, under the sting, something else, which he did not at first know how to name.
Tamsin had been feeding scraps to the dog. The dog had come up from Lowgate that afternoon, a brown, bony animal with one ear folded down, and it had walked into the Great Hall as if the Hall had been built for it and sat by Tamsin’s bowl without asking. Tamsin spoke to it in full sentences. “You are very welcome and you are very thin,” she told it. “The Warden has not yet decided what you are, and I should like you to be patient while he decides, and I should like you to have this piece of the mutton, which is not a Lessary sheep, whatever anybody says.”
“It is a Lessary sheep,” said Sella, without looking up from her plate.
“It is a sheep,” said Tamsin. “The rest is paperwork.”
“Where did the mutton come from?” Idrin asked Pell, because someone had to.
Pell was ladling barley into the bowls down the table, two spoons to each. She did not turn around. “From the Lessary road,” she said cheerfully. “A fair price, paid at the cart in silver, which the Warden will find in the chest tomorrow, in a bag marked for mutton. It was a good price for a good animal, and I made the carter cry.”
The table was quiet for a moment. Then Pell put the ladle down, wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at the Warden with an expression of great fondness and no shame at all.
“I stole it,” she said. “From the collector’s cart, on the Lessary Road, in the dark, the week before the envoy’s train came up. The carter was asleep. He still does not know. Do not tell him, boy. He has a wife.”
Idrin laughed. He had not meant to, and it came out of him in a single loud, startled bark, the kind of laugh his mother had once said was unbecoming in a prince and his brother had once said was the best thing about him. He put his hand over his mouth. The laugh went on anyway, behind the hand, and his toast ran away from him altogether. He could not finish the sentence he had begun about the Hold’s law. He sat down with his face red and his cup in both hands and the whole Chamber looking at him with varying degrees of delight.
“The Warden,” said Gaunt, “has been out-lied by a cook.”
“The Warden has been out-counted by a stair,” said Ysra, from the far end.
Harrow, who had been counting the bones on his plate, announced that the mutton had come from a sheep with four legs, which he said was the normal number. He then said the sheep had been given one leg, since the fifth leg was in the bone-pile and nobody had asked for it. Sella said the fifth leg had been broken before the sheep was killed, and that she could see the break from here. Pell said a Lessary leg was not the Hold’s concern. Tallow asked that the bone be weighed, and Idrin, who had been waiting all evening for a reason to be useful, said he would not allow it. Gaunt said the bone was worth more than the sheep and objected to its going on the midden. Nobody agreed with him. In the end the bone went under the table, where the dog received it with great courtesy and carried it, very slowly, to the door.
Ysra had not moved from the chair that faced the door. She had her back straight against the wall behind it, and she was eating very slowly, one spoon at a time, with her eyes on the doorway and her ears on the stair beyond. When Gaunt leaned down the table to say that a Hand who would not sit with her back to the room was a coward, she turned her head, very slowly, and looked at him.
“A Hand who sits with her back to the stair is a fool,” Ysra said. “I sit facing the stair. The stair has nine steps, which is a number I trust. Please pass the salt.”
Gaunt passed the salt. He did it with a long, offended sigh, and Ysra took it and salted her barley exactly, and Pell, who had been watching them both, made a small noise in her throat that Tallow, without looking up from the minutes, recorded as a laugh.
Idrin wiped his face. The laugh had gone out of him and left him light, and he found that he was looking at the table with a kind of wonder. Twelve candles. A joint of stolen mutton. A dog with one ear down, eating what it was given. A boy at the foot, shovelling barley with his fingers because the spoons were all gone. He had been trained for years to sit at tables where everyone had been chosen for him, and the thing he had been told to expect at a table was a silence, and the silence had never come. The Hands did not wait to be dismissed. They talked over him. They ate. They argued about the salt.
At the end of the meal the bowls were scraped clean. The candles had burned down to the second ring of wax. The Hands got up in ones and twos, and the dog got up with them, and the Hall began to empty into the court. Idrin stayed where he was, because the Warden’s chair was his, and because the room was not ready for him to leave it.
Across the board, at the head of the table, there was a seat nobody had taken. It had no cup and no bowl and no candle in front of it, and it faced the length of the board, with its back to the door. Idrin had noticed it at the start of the dinner and had not known what to do with it.
Now every Hand still in the room had turned to look at it.
Nobody said anything. Then, one after another, each of them spoke, quite quietly, in their own voice. Pell said a name, warm and short. Gaunt said one that was an insult. Harrow said a number. Tamsin said a name that was half a song. Korrin said nothing at all, and Ysra said a name she had not used since the night she woke, and Pim, from the foot of the table, said a name that made Pell look up sharply, because she had never heard him use it and had not known he kept it.
Idrin did not know any of the names, and he did not ask. He sat in his chair at the table’s near end, and he understood, without being able to say how, that each of them had given the name they would give a stranger who came in and sat down, and that not one of the names had been the same.