The Charter of Assent was read twice in the Great Hall, once at the first candle and once at the second, and in both readings Gaunt objected in the first line.
Tallow read it. He read it in plain words, as Idrin had asked, and he read each clause slowly enough that the Hands could hear the Ink’s stroke in every sentence. There was no Royal Form in it. There was no lift of the chin. The text said what it did, in the order it did it. It restored to Idrin Aubrec Saelmar the rank of Regent, which had lapsed at the Oath of Surrender on the day Lune’s Writ was saved. It named the instrument’s costs in the Charter’s own terms: one memory, taken by the Register and not told; one Seal, to be entered in the Register and carried on the body’s chest and down the prince’s arm; and a Tithe, which the Hold would pay in shares of labour, each share a day’s work owed to the Hands who did the work. It said nothing about Forms. The Chamber had voted, the night before, that no Form was to be lent or spent for the Charter, and the Mason’s copy had been kept in its store with its face to the wall.
