The welcome was drafted four times, and struck through four times, and on the fourth attempt Idrin sat back in the Regent’s chair and looked at the page as though it had been written by somebody else and left on his desk as an insult.
The Hold of Ormhold welcomes the child Quill to its table. The Hold is not a fortress, and the child is not a hostage, and no law of Dovereach’s making shall make either thing true in this room.
It was not a bad sentence. It was a sentence with a Regent’s shape, which meant that it was a sentence that wanted to be obeyed. He tried to find a plainer one, and found that every plain line he wrote came out with a clause hanging from it like a sleeve off a nail. The Hold will feed him. Yes. But what did feeding mean in a Hold that had no bread to spare? The Hold will keep him safe. From whom? Idrin had sat through enough Lessaran councils to know that a sentence that promised safety was a sentence that had already decided who the danger was.
He put the pen down. He had been trained, all his life, to write the Royal Forms. He knew there had once been a tutor, and a ruler tapping on a desk, and a room where the Forms were recited until the words wore smooth. He could not hear the voice that had said them. That memory had…
