The letter came into the Great Hall on the afternoon of the twenty-first day, folded in black-edged paper and opened by the Lash. Mourner watched the Lash’s hands unfold it on the Chamber table. They were steady hands, and they did not hurry, and they stopped once, halfway through the first fold, as if the paper had said something to them that they had not expected to be told.
Tallow read it aloud. He had got his voice back by the afternoon, though it still had a rasp at the end of the long words, and he took the Chancery’s letter in the Ink’s plain order, without a figure, because the Chancery’s hand had given him none to take.
It was not a long letter. It was written in the clean, exact script that Mourner had heard described at the Turn as the handwriting of a Chancery that expected to be copied. It was signed Ossane Tiller, Envoy of Lessary, at Sallowmere, and it began with the date, which was the eighth day of the Lessaran month of Harrowing, and went on, without a flourish, to the thing it had to say.
Dorran Halse, Chancellor of the Chancery of Lessary, died in his chair in the Chancery’s upper room on that day. He was at his papers. The clerk who found him says he had the Assembly’s copy of the Ormhold Register open at its first line, and that he had written nothing beside it. The Chancery’s ink passes, until…
