The Congress convened on the eighth day of the siege, under the stay, and Idrin had been awake since the fourth bell trying to find the first sentence he would say to it.
He had tried the Royal Forms. He had tried them in the dark of the bedchamber, standing at the window with his bad hand held against his coat and the Hold’s wall-lamps showing faintly below him on the causeway. We, the Regent of Ormhold, having considered the matter, find it improperly raised. He had said the sentence twice aloud and then stopped, because the grammar would not close. It had always closed for him before the Charter of Forms, when the old words came up in his mouth like a tune his tutor had hummed to him in a warm room. Now the words lay on his tongue in the wrong order, like coins from a purse that had been emptied and refilled by a stranger. He could read them. He could not make them stand up.
That was the cost of the Edict of the Forms’ Lending. It had taken the Royal Forms from him one clause at a time, and the Register did not say which clause was gone, and he had stopped asking the Register for explanations some time ago.
