The packet had been lying on the gatehouse board for six weeks, and in that time it had acquired the particular dignity that unopened post gains in a house where nobody is sure whose it is. Idrin passed it every morning on his way to the wall. He passed it at noon, when he came to check the Register’s lamp, and again at dusk, when the Chamber’s last clerk came in to sand the day’s minutes. Each time, the black wax seal sat in the same place at the top of the board, under the first line of the Register in its faded colourless ink, and each time it looked a little more like a thing that had been put there to be looked at.
He took it down on the first cold morning of the autumn’s second week, because he could not go on walking past it.
The paper was thick and cream-coloured, of the Lessary kind that had a water-mark of a crowned lion in its heart, and the seal was black wax stamped with the arms of the Crown. He knew the arms. He had seen them every day of his childhood, on the palace gates at Sallowmere and on the lid of his father’s writing box. He turned the packet over in his hands. On its face, in a hand he knew better than his own, a hand that had written him a hundred letters at school and sent him a dozen more after his exile, someone had written a single line.
To the Tenant of a Thing at Ormhold.
Idrin read it three times. Each time, the line seemed to shrink a little, as a word does when you say it too often, until it was no longer a message but only a shape made of ink. He was not the tenant. He was the Warden. He was a prince, and a fool, and a man with a scar and a lost laugh and no name he could say aloud. But he was not the tenant of anything, and the letter was not written to him. It had been written to a person who did not yet exist.
“The Chancery will not know the difference,” said Tallow.
He had come up from the minute-board without Idrin hearing him, and he stood now at the gatehouse table with his hands folded behind his back and his eyes on the packet. He kept his eyes off the Warden’s face. He looked at the seal, which was the proper place for a Clerk to look at a thing he was not yet allowed to touch.
“The Register will know it,” Tallow went on, in the flat voice he used for things that had been argued and settled. “The Register knows the difference between a letter and a tenant, Warden. It has a line for each. It has a blank where the tenant’s name ought to be. I have seen that blank every day since the first morning I woke, and I have never been able to say whether the blank is waiting to be filled, or whether it is the thing that was always supposed to stay empty.” He paused. “I ask whether the Warden wishes to open a letter that is not addressed to him.”
Idrin looked down at the seal. The black wax had been pressed carefully, with a steady hand and a fine point, so that every line of the crowned lion stood out sharp against the wax. The hand that had done it had not been in a hurry.
“No,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Tallow.
“I would like a tenant,” said Idrin slowly, as much to himself as to the Clerk. “I would like the Hold to have one. Someone who is entered under this wall and answers for it. But I will not read another man’s mail in order to learn what the Hold ought to be called. The Hold must find its own name before it reads anyone else’s. That is the order. A house cannot be let by a stranger’s letter.”
Tallow was silent for a moment. Then he unfolded his hands, and came forward, and laid one finger very lightly on the packet’s corner, not lifting it. “Then I shall write in the minutes that the Warden declined to open it,” he said, “and that he gave his reason, and that the reason is the first original thing a Warden has said in my hearing since I was given a board.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It is a spread,” said Tallow, and went back to the minute-board.
He did not need to reread the packet to know what it contained. He had read the Chancery’s letters all his life, and he knew the shape of a Crown’s tone when it was turned against a man in writing: the courtesy, the careful distances, the sentences that seemed to thank a man for his silence while they took it. This letter had none of that. It had only a single line on its face, written by a brother who had once laughed at the top of his voice in a schoolroom and had not laughed in Idrin’s hearing since. Idrin found himself reaching for that laugh again, and finding the smooth place where it had been. He did not reach far. He had learned the cost of reaching in the stiff days, and he had decided he would not pay it twice for the same thing.
He turned the packet over once more, looking at the blank beneath the wax, the place where a reply would go if anybody were ever brave enough to write one.
Idrin put the packet back on the board. He set it exactly where it had been, under the first line of the Register, with the seal turned to face the room. As he did, he looked up at the faded ink above it, and found, for the first time since he had come into the gatehouse, that he was reading the margin beside the first line as well.
The margin had a blank. It was a small space, neat and clean, the width of a finger, in the right-hand corner of the page. It had been left there by the clerk who wrote the first line, as if he had meant to come back and fill it in. A thin pencil line ran under the blank, drawn by a steady hand, and at the end of the line a single word had been started and then not finished. It looked like the first two letters of a name.
Idrin did not try to read the rest. He had the feeling that if he tried, the letters would be there in the morning, and he would not be ready.
“Warden.”
Pell had come to the gatehouse door with a basket of bread on her hip and a streak of flour across one cheek. She stood on the threshold and sniffed, once, sharply, the way she sniffed a sack she did not trust. Then she came in, set the basket on the table, and looked at the packet on the board with an expression of deep and personal dislike.
“It smells of the Lessary Chancery,” she said. “I know that smell. My mother’s house had a dressmaker who wrote receipts on that very paper, with that very wax, and she stank of it from morning till night. Lavender and lies. I will not have it in my Kitchen, boy. Put it out on the step, or put it in the fire, or give it to the dog to chew, but do not leave it in the room where I am making the bread.”
“It is not in the Kitchen,” said Idrin.
“It is in the gatehouse, which is the same as the Kitchen when you can smell the ovens through the wall.” She jabbed a finger at the seal. “That is a Lessary wax. I know a Lessary wax when it lies to me.”
Idrin looked at the packet, and at Pell’s flour-streaked face, and at the small pale mark that lay under the cloth of his coat, over his heart. He thought of the blank in the margin, and the pencil line under it, and the two letters at its end. He thought of the Writ of Ratification he had spoken a few weeks before, which had taken a memory he still could not name, and of the Seal that now lay over his heart and made the Hold’s law his own.
“I agree with you,” he said.
Pell stopped. She had her hand on the basket, ready to lift it, and she looked at him as if he had said something in a foreign tongue. “You agree,” she said.
“I do. I will not move it. It may stay where it is.”
“Then I shall have to say so in the Kitchen,” said Pell. She picked up the basket again, shaking her head, and went to the door, and turned back at the threshold with the flour on her cheek. “You will be a terrible prince, boy. You agree with the things that smell. Nobody will ever be able to buy you with a loaf.”
When she had gone, Idrin sat down again at the gatehouse table, in the chair he had carried from the Great Hall in the first week, and folded his hands on the board. The packet lay where it was. The room was cold. Through the gatehouse window he could see the causeway, and the Lessary Road beyond it, empty in the grey light, and the reeds beyond that, unmoving.
He did not know how long he sat there. When he looked at the board again, the afternoon had moved across the packet, and the black wax had softened in the warm air that came up from the Kitchen’s chimney through the old flue behind the board. The seal had begun to lose its edges. A thin, dark sheen had spread across the upper part of the wax, and through it, faint and smudged, Idrin could see a single word in his brother’s hand, pressed from the other side of the paper.
Tenant.
The rest of the page beneath it was blank.