The Great Hall had nine chairs, and Idrin had counted them every morning for three months without once asking why there were not ten.
They were plain chairs. Gaunt had made the frames from the old roof-timbers in the first winter, and Pell had stuffed the seats with straw and tied them with bark-cord, and each chair had been given its place around the long table by the Chamber’s own vote, which Tallow had minuted in full. Idrin sat in the one at the head, with the slate under its short leg. The others ran round the table in the order of their waking, and every one of them was occupied, except when a Hand was on the wall or in the goat pens or asleep on the bench by the fire.
But at the far end of the table, opposite the Warden’s chair, there was a tenth chair. It had no cushion and no cord. It had not been carpentered like the others. Its frame was grey, and its legs were of a stone that did not match the wood, and its back had no carved notch in it where the Hands had cut their marks. It had always been there. When Idrin had first come into the Hall, in the rain, with his coat half torn and his sister’s letters in his breast pocket, it had stood in the dark at the end of the table, unpainted, facing the door.
“Clerk,” said Idrin, on the morning of the fifth week of the late summer, when the Hall was empty except for himself and Tallow and the dog. “The tenth chair. What is it?”
Tallow was sitting at the minute-board with his pen in his hand and his face turned to the window. He kept facing the door. “It is the Chamber’s old provision for a visitor, Warden,” he said. “It was in the Hall before the Chamber. It has never been used.”
“It is not for a visitor,” said Sella.
She had come in from the court while they were talking, with her ledger under her arm and her sleeves rolled back from her wrists. She sat down on the stool beside the Warden’s chair without being asked, which she always did, and looked at the tenth chair with the same expression she gave to a bone that did not fit the wound.
“What is it for?” Idrin asked her.
“It is the chair where a Hand sits while it is still being counted,” said Sella. “Before it has a seat. A builder who has not yet woken comes to the table in that chair, and sits down, and the Chamber counts the chair as one of the nine. The body has been keeping the chair ready for longer than the Hold has existed. I do not think it is for a visitor at all. I think it is for the one who has not been called yet.”
“That is not a clause,” said Tallow, without turning.
“It is a diagnosis,” said Sella. “You can write it in the minutes under the clause, if you like. It will not be the same as the clause, but it will be true.”
Tallow turned round at last. He had his board on his knee and his face had the look it wore when he had found something in the Charter that he had hoped would not be there. He read it out, slowly, from the first page. “The Chamber shall consist of nine Hands, each holding one seat, and no Hand shall be seated in another’s place. That is the whole of the clause. It says nine. It says nothing about a tenth chair. It says nothing about the Mantle, or anything that is not a Hand. It does not say what the tenth chair is, and it does not say who may sit in it.”
“Then the chair is not in the Charter,” said Idrin.
“No, Warden. The chair is in the Hall. The Charter is in the Register. The two have never been the same place.”
Idrin got up from the Warden’s chair and crossed the Hall, and he stood beside the tenth chair in the light from the high window. He looked at it for a while. He did not touch it. He thought of the stiff days in early summer, when a voice had come up through the stones of the Hall and said we in a way that had made him feel as if the whole Hold had turned round to look at him. It had been the only time he had heard it speak in the Hall. It had said very little. It had not said I.
The chair was empty. It had the air of something that was waiting, as a stool waits in a kitchen when the cook has gone out and will be back in a minute.
“The Hall has nine seats,” he said, to nobody in particular. “The Chamber has voted for nine. I have signed the Charter, and I will sign any Charter the Chamber asks me to sign, so long as it is a clause I can read. But I should like the tenth chair left as it is. I should like it not moved, and not sat in, and not counted, and not taken down. I ask it for the Chamber.”
“The Warden asks,” said Tallow, slowly.
“I ask,” said Idrin. “Put it in the minutes as a request. Not as an order.”
Tallow considered this. He wrote it down, carefully, in his small clerk’s hand, and then he looked at what he had written and added a note, the chair to be left as it stands, for the present, with no sitter and no motion. He held up the pen. “Shall the Chamber agree?”
There was no need for a vote. Sella, on her stool, said agreed without looking up. The dog, under the bench, lifted its head and put it down again. Gaunt, who had come in halfway through and had stood listening in the doorway with his arms folded, said agreed in a voice of such heavy disapproval that it was clearly an agreement. Ysra, at the door, nodded once. Pell, from the Kitchen, banged a pan and said, “Yes, yes, leave the chair, boy. It has never once asked me for bread.”
“Unanimous,” said Tallow, writing. He paused with the pen above the page. “That is the first unanimous minute the Chamber has kept in the whole of its history, Warden. I should like it recorded that the Clerk did not ask for it.”
“Recorded,” said Idrin.
It was then that Tamsin came in from the pens, with straw on her skirts and a wet nose-print on the back of one hand, and stopped in the doorway. She had heard them. She looked at the tenth chair with her head tilted, the way she looked at a goat that had found a new place to lie down. “Does it have a name?” she asked.
“It does not,” said Tallow.
“Then it is a chair with a seat and no name,” said Tamsin, not unkindly, “and that is a goat without a pen. Somebody must find it a name, or it will wander off in the night and sit in the wrong place.” She turned round and went out again, and came back a few minutes later with a stool from the pens. It was a three-legged thing with a split seat, and she set it down beside the tenth chair, very carefully, so that its one leg did not scrape the stone. Then she sat on it.
“A stool is a name for anything that has been waiting,” said Tamsin. “Everybody knows that. You may call it what you like, but I shall call it the Waiting, and I shall sit here and sing to it while the Warden decides what it is.”
Idrin watched her sing. It was a very quiet song, with no words he could make out, and it went on for perhaps the length of a candle’s inch. The tenth chair did nothing. It did not creak, and it did not move, and nothing in the Hall changed that Idrin could see. But when Tamsin stopped, the dog got up from under the bench, walked slowly to the stool, and lay down with its back against the stool’s one leg, as if it had been asked to keep watch.
That night, when the Hall was locked and the candles had gone out and Idrin was lying awake in his room above the gatehouse, he heard the Great Hall door open and close, very quietly, and then he heard the sound of a chair being dragged across the flagstones. It was not a loud sound. It stopped, and then started again, and stopped.
In the morning he went down to the Hall to see. The tenth chair had been turned. It had been turned round to face the door, and now it stood square to the threshold, with its back to the long table and its grey legs planted on the flags, looking out.
Ysra was already standing beside it. She had come down before the Hall was properly awake, and she had counted the chair’s legs three times, and she had found four each time, and she was looking at the door now, the way she looked at the stair.
“Nobody moved it,” said Idrin. “I have had the Hall locked. The dog has been by the stool all night. The Chamber is agreed.”
“Then the chair moved itself,” said Ysra. “It has been counting the people who come in. It does not like to be counted back.” She put one hand on its grey back, very lightly, and then took it away again. “It is the only one in the Hall that has never once been wrong about the number.”