Pell cut the loaf by a third at the proving-trough, before the sun had got past the Kitchen’s shutters, and she did it with the same knife she had used for twenty years on the Hold’s bread, which had never once been sharpened in the Chamber’s presence.
“There,” she said, to the dough, to the trough, to the room. “Now we shall see who has the courage to eat a smaller thing.”
The dough did not answer. Pell did not expect it to. She had been a cook on the Hold’s first morning, with a fire that was two stones and a prayer, and she had learned in that year that the dough always answered more honestly than the Chamber. She weighed the cut piece on the brass scale that Tallow had lent her, and the scale said what it always said, which was that the loaf had got lighter. She wrote the figure on the slate beside the trough. Then she rubbed the flour from her forearms and went to the hatch, because the Chamber’s clerk was at the far end of the table with his ledger and a figure in his mouth, and she wanted to hear him say it before he had the chance to be careful.
