The Chamber convened in the Survey House’s hall the next morning, because the Articles allowed a Naming to be held inside reach under a Dwelling, and because nobody in the Hold could find a clause that said it could not.
Tallow had searched for one. He had spent the whole of the night in the Gatehouse with the Articles open on the board and a lamp at his elbow, going through the seventh clause and the ninth and the twentieth, looking for the word Dwelling where it had been defined and the word Naming where it was not. He found the Naming clause on the fourth page of the third copy. It was in the thirteenth article. He had read the thirteenth article a hundred times in his life, and he read it again now by lamplight with the cold coming through the Gatehouse shutter, and he noted, as he always did, that the article had been drafted by someone who was very fond of commas.
He came up the ridge at the candle-clock with the minute-book under his arm and the Articles in a leather wallet on his belt. He found the Hall full.
It was full in the way that a room is full when the people in it have all been up since before dawn and have decided, against their own wishes, to be quiet. Harrow stood by the hearth with his count-cord in his fist. Ysra sat on the bench under the west window with her…
