The ring closed on the morning after the stay was read, and by the Turn at the candle-clock the first ram had struck the river gate’s oak.
Velvet felt it before anyone spoke of it. It came up through the flagstones of the Great Hall as a cough comes up through a house, one dull knock, and then a pause, and then a second knock that was worse for the pause. She stood at the Chamber’s side wall with her hands folded at her waist, the posture her mother had taught her for the reception of ambassadors and bishops and the younger sons of very minor houses, and she counted the knocks as a courtier counts the bows of a guest. Two. Three. The fourth was the one that made the candle-clock’s flame shiver in its glass.
“Your Highness,” said Velvet, “the gate is being addressed in a very uncouth manner, and I am sure the gate would prefer a little more ceremony from the Hold’s own door.”
“The gate is a river gate,” said Idrin. He did not raise his head from the Turn’s table. “It has never had ceremony. It has had Brannoc.”
“And Brannoc is asleep.”
“Brannoc is Quiet,” said Tallow, from the clerk’s end, without looking up either. “Since the treaty, when the gate stood idle for want of a river to argue with. That is more than a year of a gate with no Hand on its water side. I give the number as a…
