The annex of the Great Hall had been a granary once, and it still smelled of it. Harrow had built the shelves himself, in the spring after the Charter, when the Hold had decided that the lodgers should have a room of their own to wait in while the Hands argued about them. The shelves were pine, not oak, because the oak had gone to the gate. They were level. Harrow had checked them with the Mason’s rule and then again with his palm, and they had held the lodgers’ bread and their children’s boots and their lists for four seasons without a single sag.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth day the annex was full. Harrow stood at its door with his trowel still in his belt and counted what came in.
Joss Hallet was first. He came in the way he always came, with his shoulders squared against any doorframe, and he stopped at the clerk’s bench by the inner door and put both his hands on it. The clerk was a thin Dovereach man who had come up the causeway with the nail, and who had been given a seat by the Writ’s door as a courtesy to the Bench. He had a slate of his own and a stub of chalk, and he had not yet written anything on the slate that morning.
