Idrin asked Tallow to draft an Oath, because an Oath was the only instrument in the Hold that bound the one who swore it and bound nobody else, and because he had decided, somewhere between the ferry and the Survey House’s low stool, that he would not give up anything in the Hold that he had not first been able to write down.
They sat in the Regent’s study at the Great Hall’s east end. It was a small room, with a shuttered window and a bench built against one wall and a table so old that its surface had been worn into shallow rings by three generations of cups. Idrin had never once used it. He had kept his papers in the Survey House and his Writs in the Gatehouse, and he had found the study too full of the Chancery’s habits to be comfortable in. Tallow had come in with the minute-book under one arm and a lamp in his other hand, and had set the lamp on the table, and had looked round the room with the flat, appraising attention of a clerk who has been asked to draft something in a room he has never liked.
