The Congress had opened with a figure standing behind a clerk’s chair, and on the fourteenth day of the siege it closed the same way, except that the figure was now being carried out.
Idrin watched it go from the Regent’s chair at the head of the Great Hall table. He had sat in that chair long enough to know which of its joints complained, and he had learned not to rest his left arm on the carved rail, where the cold had settled into his grip since the Charter of Forms was ratified in the winter. The cold did not spread. It stayed in the hand like a coin left in a pocket, and he had stopped mentioning it, because the Hall had enough to count without his fingers.
Along the table the Corvanne envoy in black felt sat with her silver torc turned toward the lamps. The Lessaran observer in grey wool kept his notes flat under one palm, as though the paper might blow away. At the Dovereach end sat Hesper Quill, who had come back up the causeway that morning on foot with her son’s stay folded inside her coat. She wore her spectacles on the end of her nose, and her hands lay still in her lap, and she was correct in every line of her face except one, which Idrin had not seen since the day she read the copy’s seal in the Great Hall arch.
