The Lessaran clerk at the cordon’s table was the same clerk who had come up the causeway under the flag two days before, in the soft voice of a man reading a sentence he had not written. He had a small camp table set up on the causeway’s south verge, under a square of Lessaran red and grey, with a stool, a standish, a sealed box and a leather folder. The folder lay open at his elbow. Korrin could see the clause through the flap.
The clerk looked up when he came. He did not stand. He waited, with his hands folded on the table, until Korrin had put down the bread-sack on the verge and stood in front of him, and then he smiled, very slightly, as a man smiles at a bargain that has been struck by somebody else’s hand.
“You have brought the Hard Hands’ bread,” said the clerk.
“I have brought it,” said Korrin. “It is theirs. Read me the clause.”
The clerk read it. He did it in the Assembly’s voice, which was careful and precise and unhurried. He read it in full, every word, the way Korrin had heard the Chamber’s clerk read the Articles, and Korrin stood with his arms folded and his eyes on the folder and listened to it as though it were a wall he was being asked to climb.
