The Judgment was put to the voices present, and each Hand said its voice aloud, which was slower than a show of hands and better. Idrin had asked Tallow for that rule at the Turn, and Tallow had given him the Charter’s clause, and then, after a short pause, had said that the Regent was right, and that a voice said aloud in a room could not be taken back by a count. He had written it in the margin in the Ink. Voices, by name, in the Hand’s own mouth.
So they said it, one at a time, down the length of the long table, in the Great Hall at the candle-clock with the candles lit on either side of the chair and the windows propped open to the midsummer dusk.
Idrin read the Judgment first. He read it in his own voice, the plain voice he had learned at the gate, and he read it through once, without stopping, in full. Gaunt, Smith of the Forge, a Hand of the Hold, disposed of forty ingots of the Chamber’s iron without a receipt, to a factor of Coldharbour, in the night. Is the Hand’s act a theft of the body, or a debt owed to a buyer? Gaunt is fined. The fine is payable in shares, and the sum shall be set at the Judgment’s close.
