Tallow set the sum in the gatehouse, at the table under the lamp he kept for the Register’s own business, with the minute-book open at the Judgment’s last line and his own margin note in the Ink beneath it. He had the Forge’s tally on his left, and the Watch’s slate copied fair on his right, and the Hold’s share-book open at the page where the Chamber recorded the labour-days owed to each Hand. He had a clean sheet for the working and a pencil for the figures that would be argued over, because a pencil could be rubbed out and a figure in the Ink could not, and he had decided that the sum of a fine was the one figure in the Hold that ought to be open to correction until the moment it was read.
He gave the range first. He always did, and he would not have begun any other way, even for a Smith.
“Between twenty and sixty shares,” he wrote, in the margin of the working sheet. Then he sat and looked at it for some time.
The range was wide because the fine was not one thing. It was the forty ingots, certainly, and each ingot was a day’s labour in the Forge’s own reckoning, because the Forge had been short of iron for a season and had been working the racks with the Watch’s share in mind. But the forty days were not a fixed number of days. They were a number…
