Idrin had to write the Writ of Consent himself, because the Articles said that a Naming was only a Hand’s wish until the Mantle’s own voice gave it weight, and the only instrument that could bring the Mantle’s voice into a room was a Writ, and a Writ was the one thing in the Hold that the Regent still had the right to draft.
He sat at the Survey House’s long table with the Articles open on his left and the Writ’s blank on his right, and the lamp burning low, and he felt the ordinary Regent’s coldness come up through his shoulders the way it always did when a clause was about to be made. He had learned to dislike that coldness. He had come to think of it as the feeling a man gets when he is about to decide something for other people. The Hold had taught him, slowly, that the feeling was not the same as wisdom, and that the Mantle could tell the difference from across the room.
So he did not draft a Royal Form. He had tried, in the first hour, and had got as far as We, by the authority of the Regent’s rank, and had looked at the words for some time, and had drawn a single line through them with his pen, and had felt, very faintly, the pleasure of a man who has finally stopped hearing his brother’s voice. Then he began again, in the plainest words he had.
